Zamiatou is the mother of two quarrelsome boys and a depressed teenage girl. She is also the wife of a man arrested for political reasons who returned from prison mentally and physically destroyed. She struggles hard to survive in a poor and desolate area. She is ready to face anything to keep the family alive except prostituting her beautiful daughter.

Michael Haneke's adaptation of Franz Kafka's The castle is an ingenious, faithful interpretation evoking Kafka's vision of a dystopian society hobbled by paperwork and bled dry by conformism and convolution.