Horror is central in the tragic life of Rose (a transcendent Sandra Hüller), victim of a harrowing childhood and innumerable atrocities on the battlefields of the Thirty Years War, leaving her face disfigured from a bullet-wound. From an early age, she noticed the freedom a pair of trousers would afford her, and has since spent her life posing as a man. With the war over, Rose travels to a remote German Protestant village, laying a dubious familial claim to a dilapidated stretch of farmland. Rose’s life is one of fabrications, careful deceptions, a delicate ecosystem of repression which begins to unravel when she is betrothed to a local’s daughter.