Elsa (50) is a single woman with a simple life, a life that unfolds between the walls of a religious institution where she works as a cleaner and those of her small council flat in the melancholy city suburbs of northern Italy.
The quietness of her life is abruptly broken when a young man kills himself leaving a letter behind, “To the mother I never met”. Elsa is the mother. At the age of 16 she gave him up for adoption, at birth, as he was the result of an incestuous relationship.
The menacing pressure of the son’s foster mother who is desperate to know the content of the letter, the phantom pregnancy of a young novice in the religious institution where Elsa works, and a strange encounter with a man who resembles the dead son, are the events that take Elsa on a journey of the reawakening of her maternal instinct.
The initial rejection towards her child turns into distorted obsession, which drives Elsa to believe in his resurrection and the reunion of mother and son.