The film opens with a battlefield in World War 1, 1918, where a German Soldier Tomás gets
killed by an explosion.
As he dies, he sees a vision of a little girl calling his name.
During ceasefire, bodies of the fallen soldiers are dropped into a pit, including Tomás’.
However…
His superior notices that he is still alive and pulls him aside.
When he takes a look at Tomás’ side, he finds bruises caused by the explosion.
We then skip to 6 months later.
The war is over and Tomás now works as a post-mortem photographer.
He just finished taking a picture of a family with their dead daughter when he meets Anna.
Anna who came from a village nearby, informs him that there are quite a few unburied dead
bodies in her village whose families would love to get their pictures taken.
He takes a good look at Anna right before she leaves, and is confounded by the realization
that Anna is the girl he saw in his vision, right when he died before.
Intrigued by this, he decides to follow Anna back to her village.
To put context as to what’s going on, many Europeans are dying during this time period
because of both the Spanish flu and the World War, hence the many dead bodies in Anna’s
village.
Also, the reason why most of them have not been buried yet is because winter is coming
and the ground has frozen over.
Now back to the story, Tomás arrives at the village and sees a glimpse of Anna dragging
her sick aunt in a wheelchair.
He finds lodging in the house of Marcsa, a mysterious and quiet woman who lives alone.
He also finds the villagers odd but makes nothing of it.
Once he settles in, he comes across Anna roaming about and asks if he could come with her.
They take a stroll up the hill and bond with each other, with Anna sharing that her mother
died and her father never came back from the war, so she now lives with her aunt.
As it turns out, Anna is headed towards the graveyard, and we learn that she often visits
this place and seems fascinated with the dead.
Later at night, Tomás is woken up from his sleep by a noise of someone moving about.
He goes to investigate, but then…
The scream is coming from another room, so he enters it :
The footsteps are coming to the attic, so he climbs up out of curiosity, but finds nothing
there.
He comes back to bed and goes back to sleep, right when this happens:
In the morning, he tries telling Marcsa about the strange noises he heard last night but
Marcsa simply diverts the topic like he never asked.
Later, Tomás begins his first day as a post-mortem photographer in the village with the help
of a villager who is kind enough to let Tomás set up a makeshift studio in his home.
One by one, the villagers start bringing in the dead bodies of their loved ones, while
Tomás carefully poses them and even puts make-up on them so that they would look more
alive.
Sometime during the session, Anna visits him because she is intrigued by his work.
She talks about how she is not afraid of being around dead people, and instead is only scared
of ghosts.
However, when she is going through Tomás’ portfolio ;
Anna suddenly looks uncomfortable and excuses herself.
Curious, Tomás follows her home and peeks through the window to find Anna tending to
her sick aunt.
Tomás goes away and resumes his day by setting up a darkroom to print the pictures he just
took.
However, he notices something odd: there appears to be an ominous shadow of a person in the
background.
He prints more pictures and realizes that all of them have similar shadows as well.
Tomás spends the rest of his day pondering about what might have caused this.
Right when hears a scream.
Tomás follows the restless villagers to a burning house, where they find someone’s
leg dangling above the fireplace.
A villager blows a hole through the wall to see who it is.
Tomás snaps several pictures, while the villagers drag out the burnt woman.
Afterwards, Tomás examines the pictures he took from the burning house and finds several
shadows in them too.
Anna comes over and tells him that it must be the ghosts who did it, signifying that
there really are strange entities roaming this village and that Anna knows about them,
and then…
All the furnitures get knocked over.
Scared, she makes a dash outside but Tomás follows her and embraces her to calm her down.
To his surprise, she shoves him away and tells him to leave because although she has always
known that there are ghosts in the village, they never hurt anyone before Tomás came.
That night, when Tomás is asleep, something strange happens:
He immediately wakes up, packs up and takes a horse to leave the village.
However, when he takes a rest and falls asleep, he has a nightmare about Anna being attacked
by unseen forces.
Not wanting this to happen, he returns, and Anna who didn’t actually mean what she said
yesterday welcomes him cheerfully.
Accompanied by Anna, Tomás begins asking around to see if anyone else in the village
has been experiencing strange things as well.
He happens upon two villagers and the two share stories about strange sounds on the
attic at night, and one of them even says that a shadowy figure grabbed her ankle during
her sleep.
They then proceed to visit Utka, a widow who tells them about the strange manner of her
husband Tybalt’s death.
She claims that she was just returning from the basement when her husband’s neck simply
melted off and he died on the spot.
Tomás and Anna decide to investigate the basement but they find nothing there.
Unbeknownst to them, a shadow is lurking in the basement, and as the two are about to
climb back upstairs…
Anna is suddenly lifted off the ground, while Tomás gets dragged to sit on the dining chair,
mimicking the exact event that killed Utka’s husband.
To make it even creepier, Tomás and Anna begin yelling Utka and Tybalt at each other.
When it’s over, they rush outside and asks to see Tybalt’s dead body.
Utka points them to the barn, where the bodies of the dead villagers are kept.
Anna recognizes all of them and says that they all died from the Spanish flu, but as
Tomás takes a closer look, he finds that they have similar bruises as the one he has
himself, meaning that they somehow were killed by an explosion instead.
Tomás theorizes that the ghosts must be flying around and causing explosion-like effects,
which killed these villagers.
He is also convinced that the ghosts are trying to talk to him and Anna for some reason, because
if the ghosts wanted to kill them, they would have already.
The two then go to work: they hang up bells around the barn to mark the ghosts’ arrival,
and with the help of two villagers, they spread flour all over the floor.
Tomás naturally sets up his camera to take pictures, along with a phonograph to record
sounds in case the ghosts are trying to talk to them.
At night, the two set up camp at the barn and trade stories about how they both died
and came back to life.
As it turns out, Anna was stillborn because she choked on her umbilical cord during birth,
but she somehow came back to life.
And then suddenly…
The haunting has started.
They begin hearing rapid footsteps all over the roof, and the bells starts ringing.
Out in the streets, a village boy Lasica is out and about in the night, right when he
senses something’s amiss and begins running.
Lasica’s mother steps out of her house and finds her son there,...
She attempts to save her son but gets stopped by an unseen force.
Inside the barn, Tomás and Anna take cover while all the bells are ringing.
Suddenly, a shadow flies into the room and slides under them.
Anna loses her footing and drops right on top of the dead bodies.
She steps away in fear while Tomás gets dragged
by an unseen force.
But then all of the sudden…
everything stops.
Tomás and Anna warily step out of the barn to check things out, and after making sure
coast is clear, he tells Anna to wait outside while he goes back to retrieve his camera.
But once he gets back inside…
He stares in horror at the sight of the rotting corpses floating in strange poses in the air.
What makes it even more strange, Anna is in the middle, and she suddenly makes a dash
towards him.
The real Anna joins Tomás inside, followed by the two villagers that helped them earlier.
The next morning, Tomás and Anna listen to the phonograph recording from last night but
find nothing.
Bored, Tomás heads to the dark room to print the photos from last night instead.
As expected, shadows turn up in the photos, and he shouts to announce it to Anna, prompting
the girl to press on the recording to pause it.
Right then, Anna discovers that if she slows down the recording, she’s actually able
to hear coherent words of a scary voice of a man asking Tomás to take him to the grave.
Tomás returns to the room and shows her the photos from last night, one of them somehow
being of a snowy winding path.
Afterwards, Anna shows him the recording:
The villagers crowd if front of the house
to ask what’s going on and Anna shares her and Tomás’ recent findings.
She deduces that the ghosts aren’t spirits of the dead villagers.
After the villagers leave, Tomás and Anna venture around the village to look for the
place that matches the photo.
They arrive at Lasica’s house and finds Lasica along with the rest of his family dead.
The rest of the villagers take notice of the scream and rush to check out what’s going
on.
And then, a man gets dragged away, while the rest of the villagers try to pull him to no
avail.
He ends up getting dragged into a house and floats on the ceiling...
It doesn’t stop there, objects are scarily moving on their own, prompting the villagers
to panic.
They huddle in fear and start to pray, but things don’t seem to get better:
Even worse, the man leading the prayer begins to get possessed before passing out on the
ground.
More and more villagers start floating,
and even Anna’s crippled aunt suddenly rises from her wheelchair and starts walking.
from her wheelchair and starts walking.
She lunges at Tomás, and with the same voice as the recording earlier pleads to be taken
to the grave shortly before passing out.
Lasica rises from the dead and begins walking towards the villagers, while they go hide
inside the village’s chapel.
They close the chapel door, and Tomás soon realizes that Anna’s not inside.
Worried for her safety, he begs to be let out.
He finds her inside the barn, floating in the air before getting dragged outside.
Tomas rushes to her aid but he realizes the two of them aren’t strong enough to stop
the ghosts.
He comes up with a plan and asks Marcsa to tell the villagers to carry all of the dead
bodies outside of the barn, because the ghosts are attracted to dead bodies.
He follows Anna into Lasica’s house, where Anna’s aunt is possessed and thrashing about.
The villagers work together and begin arranging the dead bodies in Lasica’s house, but the
house suddenly rattles.
Cracks begin appearing on the wall,
and the house begins to sink to the ground.
The ghost finally stops dragging Anna away, so Tomás takes her in his arms and hands
her over to Marcsa through the gap left on the door.
Unfortunately, Tomás is now stuck inside the sinking house.
Water starts seeping through the cracked walls and floods the floor, while the roof is now
on fire.
As if things are not bad enough, this happens:
Meanwhile, water keeps rising inside the house,
leaving Tomás with no option but to dive to look for a way out, but then…
It turns out that the corpses inside the house are coming back to life as well.
One of them pulls Tomás under and demands him to bring them to afterlife.
At this point, Tomás runs out of breath and chokes on water before passing away.
In the next scene, he finds himself inside an ominous building that we can assume is
purgatory, where he finds the dead bodies of the villagers inside the rooms.
While Tomás is in purgatory, Marcsa attempts to rescue Tomás by taking a rope and climbing
the burning roof.
Marcsa enters through the chimney, while Tomás keeps exploring the rooms.
Now the dead bodies inside Tomás’ purgatory are rising up from the dead as well, only
this time, they follow Tomás towards what appears to be divine light.
Meanwhile, Marcsa has successfully made it inside the building.
She reaches for Tomás and loops the noose around his legs before dragging him up the
chimney with her.
They safely make their way back up, and the villagers try to rouse Tomás from the dead.
Back in purgatory, Tomás finds himself alone, with Anna floating across the room.
He comes up to her and lies beside her.
They float together and he gets carried upwards by a swirl of gray shadows.
Back in the realm of the living, Anna is crying and begging for him to wake up, and we can
see a similar gray shadow floating in the sky.
But then…
The vision seems to snap Tomás back to earth, and he comes back to life.
The gray shadow disappears into thin air while Anna smiles in relief.
Some time has passed and it is now time for Tomás to leave.
He and Marcsa express their farewells, and we see Anna happily coming along with him.
Together, they ride far away from the village, and stop upon the sight of a dead bull, followed
by the voices of screaming villagers in the distance.
The movie ends with the two deciding to head to this village to help the people just like
they helped Anna’s village.