[1] Gössmann, a bookkeeper who has just stolen a large sum of money from his employer gets stuck in an elevator of an office tower together with Jörg, his lover Marion and the young Pit.

Gössmann remains quiet in a corner of the cabin, while Marion socializes with Pit and continues her ongoing quarrels with Jörg.

Engineers start to rescue the passengers, eventually by lifting them with a rope through the shaft, after they fail to move the cabin with failsafe motors.

The main theme of the movie is the sudden life-threatening situation unsuspecting people find themselves in the most normal of circumstances on a most usual day.

The conflicts do not happen independently of a reasonable collective effort to escape the predicament, but they determine the conditions for it, leading to further injuries and death.

A story told by Jörg to Pit in the film may be a metaphor for their situation: It is about a man who gets trapped in a refrigeration train car on its journey.