A man falls out of his small boat and while on the thin line between life and death he looks back over his life. Using the context of a drowning man who reviews his life and past major events in his last moments, this long, pessimistic film looks at ponderous and depressing subjects: young hotheads only interested in expounding their viewpoints, corpses in a concentration camp, Norwegians giving a "heil Hitler" one-armed salute to the Gestapo leader in Oslo in 1941, the atomic bomb explosions in World War II, and personal issues of bad relationships. It seems like everything in the world is going down with the drowning man.