Gena Rowlands stars as Marion Post, a fifty-year-old philosophy professor who teaches at a university and is writing a book on Martin Heidegger. Her personal and professional life appears firmly established. She has a prestigious academic career, her husband is a renowned cardiologist, they maintain an active social life, have many friends, and share a beautiful apartment in New York. Marion’s need for silence and concentration to work on her book leads her to rent a nearby apartment. Her accumulated exhaustion causes her to fall asleep there, only to wake after overhearing a psychoanalysis session from a neighboring office through the ventilation system.

The first session Marion hears is that of a man who longs for the love of another man, regretting that he settled into a marriage with a woman he cares for but does not truly love. As the days pass, the sessions that most capture her attention are those of a pregnant young woman who expresses a persistent dissatisfaction with her life: depression, existential anguish, questions about desire, and long silences. Marion feels deeply drawn to this woman’s words, to the point that we perceive her identification with her and the beginning of a reevaluation of her own life in relation to her marriage, her career, and love. What was not, or what might have been.