Two criminals, one wounded, decide on a home invasion in order to self-perform a bullet-extraction surgery with a fork. The homeowner turns out to be a writer of horror stories, who soon shares his ideas with the criminals.

During Stalin's reign of terror, Evgenia Ginzburg, a literature professor, was sent to 10 years hard labor in a gulag in Siberia. Having lost everything, and no longer wishing to live, she meets the camp doctor and begins to come back to life.

Carmen Legg, a tall sporty red-head, is fed up with men and their one-track minds. She is thirty something, drives her own BMW, lives in her own apartment and likes to run her own life the way she wants it. What she needs, Carmen decides, is a man with higher things on his mind. So with her friend, an eighty-year-old neighbour with a traumatic past, she places a rather unusual advertisement...