A family has gathered at a large country estate to celebrate mid-summer. There are four generations present Katha, in her fifties, is a divorced doctor with two daughters, her elderly parents are still alive, although her father has premonitions of death.

One of her daughters, Annika, is unhappy and believes her marriage is about to break up. The younger daughter, Sassa, has a ten-year-old daughter, although she never married . She has an affair with Ingrid, also an unmarried mother.

But this summer, Sassa has brought to the house a young man she has just met. Also a guest in the house is Emma, a social worker and Katha's life long friend, who probes the Swedish bourgeois idyll represented by the sunlit anthill of Paradise Place.

Tension mounts as conflict develops between various members of the family and within a few days, the summer holiday is transformed by tragedy.