As the movie opens Elena, in her early twenties, is completing and passing the exam to become an assistant nurse. She is hired out by an agency to serve in the house of Cindy and Jim Ackerman as live-in caregiver for Jim's mother, an affable old lady that has mobility problems.
The Ackerman couple seems to live in a sort of amused tolerance of each other. Elena's hiring was decided by Cindy without consulting Jim, but he takes the decision with equanimity. Elena has her own room, shares the family's cramped quarters and dinner table and is sometimes awkwardly thrust into problems she knows nothing about. Cindy is kind and motherly to Elena with a touch of pushiness, and Jim enjoys conversations with Elena that Cindy would probably don't bother to engage in. The setting changes with the visit of Nathan, the couple's son, a prospective artist (some of his paintings hang on the walls) and with Jim's mother having an accident that sends her to hospital and makes problematic her return home. Elena is now redundant. Exit Elena.
That's all we get; there are no flashbacks or revelations by any of the characters. All we manage to know about Elena is: she has a Slavic last name and knows a mournful love song in Serbian taught her by her grandmother. She seems to have no contact with her family or place to stay. Nathan is very hight strung, almost hyperactive and there is an unexplained tension in his interchanges with his parents and Elena. And, we never get to know Jim's real or imagined business transactions that require him to use the house as an office to the annoyance of Cindy. It is the viewer's job to connect the dots and this makes the movie fascinating.
