Roberto has just been laid off due to his advanced age and diabetes. With his severance pay, he decides to buy a van and learn to drive so that he can take a trip with his wife Hilda to the town of their youth, Taltal, on the Pacific coast of the Chilean desert.

Raquel has been the live-in housekeeper for a kind, reasonably wealthy family for half her life, and the joyless repetition of the job has begun to take its toll. Increasingly dependent on painkillers, Raquel resorts to pranks and childish avoidance to antagonize the family’s college-age daughter and a procession of new servants, all in the hopes of protecting her precarious power within the home. Her antics successfully push everyone away, until new maid Lucy actually pushes back.

This stark Chilean melodrama concerns itself with the plight of slum dwellers living outside Santiago. For many years they have, with great difficulty, been faithfully paying small sums to a real estate man. This man has said that by doing so they can obtain title to the miniscule plots of land their houses stand on. In fact, he has been swindling them and does not even own the land he has been "selling." One of the aggrieved slum dwellers confronts him about this while he is visiting the slum, and the real estate agent shoots him before everyone's eyes. The question confronting these witnesses is whether testifying against this monster will make their lives even more precarious.

A Spanish sailor becomes involved with a woman whose child was stolen by the mafia.