The end of the 1980's. Alois Nebel works as a dispatcher at the small railway station in Bílý Potok, a remote village on the Czech-Polish border. He's a loner who prefers old timetables to people, and he finds the loneliness of the station tranquil - except when the fog rolls in. Then he hallucinates, seeing ghosts and shadows from the dark past of Central Europe. Alois can't seem to shake these nightmares and eventually ends up in a sanatorium. There he gets to know The Mute, a man carrying an old photograph who was arrested by the police after crossing the border. No one knows why he came to Bílý Potok or who he's looking for, but it is his past that propels Alois on his journey