Grieving after the death of his wife, art historian Max Morden returns to the sleepy seaside resort where he spent summers as a child. Max lodges at a boarding house he once frequented, where frosty proprietor Miss Vavasour, and eccentric resident Blunden, now reside. Before long - and despite protestations from his daughter Clare - Max revisits the ghosts of his past. Max's mind returns to an idyllic summer in 1955 when, as a child, he encountered the Grace family. Carlo and Connie were unlike any adults he had met before: nonchalant, bohemian and filled with worldly grace and candour. Young Max befriends the young Grace twins, Chloe and Myles, and his fascination for this unconventional clan transforms into intimacy and love. Meanwhile, the children's young nanny Rose, an outsider like Max, regards the Grace's new surrogate with quiet suspicion. While Max attempts to deal with the loss of his wife, and recalls moments with his departed partner Anna, he also confronts a distant trauma from the past. This film is a haunting, uplifting, meditation on the human condition - at times elegiac, poetic, and nostalgic. A story of memory, love, loss, regret... and the persistent possibility of rebirth.