Zoltán Frimont is a young French physician of Hungarian origin working for the organisation Physicians Without Borders. He is on a mission in Romania with his wife, who is also a doctor, when he collapses unexpectedly, and finds himself at a psychiatric institution in Transylvania. Within a short time, life in hospital becomes familiar to him, he discovers the peculiar world of the mentally ill, and instinctively feels he is surrounded by a better, more genuine world in the hospital than in the "normal" world he used to live in. He decides that he will never leave the hospital. However, he is so burdened by a trauma in his past that it becomes more and more intolerable, and he must return to Paris for a short time. It seems this move was premature: he must go back to the mental patients in Transylvania in order to come to terms with his past once and for all, and to reveal his strange secret.