It is based on the novel Aftermath by American author Scott Campbell, telling the story of a "complicated family situation" after the unexpected and unexplained suicide of a young man.

[3] The Munich-based interior designer, Eliane Richter, shown "in the constant stress of the annoyed career woman",[4] commissions the painter, Max Hollander, to draw a portrait of her children, Alexander and Lilly.

[6] Harald Pauli in the Focus (German magazine), attempted to answer this question quoting Caroline Link saying, that the death of her father, a friend and her daughter’s severe illness cast a shadow on her life.

"[4] The Sueddeutsche Zeitung raved about the filming locations and a reference to the 1991 movie La Belle Noiseuse by Jacques Rivette.

[3] Likewise, the film-dienst praised its "many pictorial compositional and representational finesses" without which "one would probably have to critically name the trivial pitfalls of the plot, which often touch the melodramatic, even kitschy".

[8] The Frankfurter Rundschau stood out in harshly criticizing the "long-awaited film" after a seven year hiatus as being "unfortunately long and predictable... with an irrepressible love for the surfaces of bourgeois life".

It finds fault with Scott Campbell s score fitting too neatly into the conventions of bourgeois psychodramas, as they have been innumerably varied in the cinema since Robert Redford’s classic "A Normal Family".