Robis is walking home from the shop late at night, enjoying some time with himself, but is interrupted by a phone call from his girlfriend Sabine. Meanwhile, a suspicious man mistakes Robis for a policeman.

The Soviet Union teeters on the verge of collapse in 1990 and tiny Baltic nations struggle to take back their independence. A rising tide of public opinion opposes the Estonian national team's participation in the USSR's basketball championship. The team makes the unpopular choice to participate.

The carelessness of summer residents, relentless sun, bare skin, water, and blood. Sudden injury of Kiril's girlfriend rips the temporal and spatial boundaries in his hazy consciousness. Struggling to find a way and help his girlfriend, he tries to distinguish the harsh reality from the acid dream, where his parents' country house still reigns in peace, surrounded by closest friends enjoying tranquil summer days.

In a moment of cowardice, Detective Carl Mørck sends Rose, his junior colleague in Department Q, to the remote Danish island of Bornholm to answer his old colleague Christian Habersaat's repeated requests. But during his forced retirement ceremony Christian kills himself sending Rose into a journey deep into her own traumatic past. Later, Department Q are embroiled into an old cold case of a girl found dead hanging in a tree.