NOT A WORD

A shooting star in her field, conductor Nina Palcek is diligently preparing for a concert of Mahler’s 5th Symphony at the Berlin Philharmonic. With the highly anticipated performance on the horizon, rehearsal is abruptly interrupted by news that her teenage son, Lars, has been injured at school – perhaps by his own hand.
Prioritizing her child over her professional success, she whisks Lars away to a remote island on which the family used to summer. As it is winter, though, the nostalgic refuge is near-abandoned and inhospitable. With the onset of a storm, the pair are cut off from the mainland and confined to a sombre cliffside house where Nina begins to find her child’s behaviour increasingly disturbing. Accrued silence turns to misunderstanding and jagged paranoia as Nina begins suspecting her quick-to-anger child of involvement in the recent death of a schoolmate. Approaching a point of no return, the pair edge towards a gripping climax, somehow drawing Nina closer to her son and to Mahler’s music.