A man must choose between his mother and his wife as the rivalry ratchets up throughout New Year's Eve. Like Pick's previous films, New Year's Eve does not use intertitles.

The everyday lives of a poverty-stricken railway trackman, his wife and daughter in a remote, isolated house in a winter landscape. One day, they receive a telegram announcing the arrival of the section inspector, who is to live with the family. After his arrival, a downward spiral begins.

Orphan Enid White becomes the ward of a cruel man. She gets close to her guardian's wife and also to his son, who secretly comes to visit when his father is not around. One evening Enid is whipped by the patriarch, and hours later he is found dead. An investigation follows.

The young Evelyne lives with a man, her fiancee Frank, with whom she has a child. But her fiancee is a rundown drunk constantly hanging over the bottle. Evelyne wants to leave Frank.

The director and co-writer Lupu Pick plays musician Erik Paulsson, who loses his beloved son after a peaceful yet critical poetry reading is raided by the tsarist forces. Paulsson, beside himself with grief, kills the officer responsible and is sentenced to life, which will mean 18 years in prison before he is free again. While he is inside, by a strange quirk of fate, his daughter Karin falls in love with writer Sebald Brückner, the son of the state prosecutor, who indicted Paulsson and is a staunch advocate of the death penalty. The conflict between the fathers does not impair the relationship of the young couple. However, when Sebald’s long-desired success on the stage is threatened by a vengeful theatre director who had sexually harassed Karin, he is enraged and kills the other man in a fight. The prosecutor now must face the blow of losing his own son to the death penalty.

A working-class couple living on a river barge sees their fragile stability shattered when a seductive outsider enters their closed world. Jealousy, desire, and social pressure slowly build, leading to betrayal and an inescapable tragic outcome as the city comes into view.