Middle aged bourgeoisie couple lives a loveless life along with their beautiful eighteen year old daughter. The man has a passionate desire for the girl who in fact is not his real daughter but the fruit of an affair of the woman early in the marriage. This leads to tragic events.

A young couple moves into an old house. She teaches deaf children, he is a musician, working on his own compositions. Their separate worlds, one silent, the other full of sounds, create a vivid pattern of contrasts, which affect their emotional lives and their living together. From the time they move into the house, they are strangely aware of something odd, especially she, while he concentrates more and more upon his work. A series of incidents adds to her growing uneasiness about the house. Its past seems to creep in on her. She feels as if some tragedy must have befallen the people that lived there before, but when she starts asking around she gets few answers. There is something about the house that seems to be on the verge of overpowering her - something that in an unexpected way is related to her origins and permanently affects her life and destiny.