Monster

A normal family with normal problems: Charlotte and Paul, their daughter Vera and their granddaughter Jo. Paul, having recently retired, is enjoying the sedateness of the additional hours of spare time he just gained. Charlotte wants to finally realize her dreams – together with Paul of course – the dreams she had shelved all her life. Vera is still waiting to get her own piece of happiness, which she thinks she deserves; Jo wants to finally experience a real adventure: at age eleven, other girls have already sailed around the world on their own...

Charlotte’s fear to disappear before her life has really begun grows constantly with her increasing certainty that she has Alzheimer’s disease. When Charlotte eventually leaves her old life behind at a motorway service area, Paul and Vera are left puzzled and somewhat shocked. On her trip, Charlotte lets the world absorb her and she encounters life; she learns how to swim and dances until she doesn’t know if she is turning around the world or if the world is turning around her.

Paul’s plan to get her back gives way to his realisation that her disease confronts him with a whole new choice: whether or not to follow her into chaos. He plunges into a strange world. He fights over a woman – his woman – for the first time in his life. And he realizes what he has been missing for the last 35 years.

Paul and Charlotte rob a supermarket, steal a car, decide never to sleep again, they count each other’s wrinkles, make love in the boot of the car, they shout at windmills and they fall in love for the very first and last time in their lives. They delay the moment of parting to infinity; when reality catches up with them, they don’t hesitate any longer: they swim out to the sea until they are swallowed by the tiny line that separates the sea from the sky.