In postwar Germany, a displaced Czech boy, separated from his family during wartime, is befriended by an American GI while the boy's mother desperately searches for him.

An unworldly and closed-minded American travels to a small village in exotic Chiapas, Mexico; at the behest of his estranged mother when his half-sister disappears during a local epidemic of kidnappings attributed to the legendary J-ok'el, the weeping woman, who drowned her own babies, centuries ago and whose spirit has returned to claim more children as her own.

Instead of enjoying her vacations in a peaceful peninsula of Turkey, Anna feels stuck in a strange torpor, while her boyfriend, Thomas, doesn't seem to notice it at all. Later in the afternoon, when a little girl suddenly disappears on the beach, Anna awakens and decides to go and find her, despite the unknown and the nightfall.