The film's two main protagonists are Russia's best saber fencers. One of them has long been in the limelight, the other only recently made it into the national team and has been winning almost every tournament since. The two athletes begin to fight for supremacy both on and off the arena.
The film is a parable about fear; it is a story about the attitudes of a mother and daughter deprived of love, who temporarily find mutual understanding, rallied by fear before the story invented by the mother about a cannibalistic wolf. On a philosophical level it is a reflection on the lost purity of thoughts, which is the main condition for the harmony of human life, and yet another illustration of the proverb: “The sleep of reason produces monsters”
The father of the six-year-old Kolya is a criminal; he does not live with his family and only sometimes takes his little son out into nature. As he is still very young, the boy does not understand: he is completely enamoured with his father and imitates him in his own way, thus defending his love. For the spectator this is a drama; for the boy a dream — light and sincere.
