Rudolph Wurlitzer -

“So, no sex, no god, no dreams” – otherwise Lu will talk about anything. She tells her parents that she’s going to kickboxing camp for two weeks. Actually, she has decided to take some time off and rents a room in a Bed and Breakfast called “Zur schönen Gegenwart” (the beautiful now). Lu is 16 and she doesn’t have a story, not a real one, not yet. But she can talk like others breathe. In the B’n’B she meets Tulpe Valentin, an old author who has written eight novels, but finished the last one years ago. She thinks she has left her life behind along with her writing. The time off that Valentin and her ill B’n’B neighbor are taking is more like waiting for the right moment to give up. “A punch hurts less if you see it coming.” But then Lu comes along and starts talking and Valentin listens and writes it all down – it’s her last novel, because she sees life right in front of her. It’s not her own, but another life is continuing.

Journalist Martin Koller is in hospital and cannot sleep. He is tortured by strange sounds in his ear that have thrown him into a deep depression. The fact that his wife desperately wants a child from him and that a young, ambitious colleague is messing with his research in the right-wing extremist scene isn’t exactly helping. Then he finds out that his mother is on the brink of death. So he pulls himself together and heads back to his childhood home. He spends a few days alone with his mother. And then, the visitors start showing up and taking over the entire house. They’re all over the place: in the cellar, in the rooms, in the attic. No one knows where they came from, no one knows what they want. A doctor Martin has known since his youth calls and tells him that she has made a mysterious discovery. A nightmare begins.