Mona is a fair haired, plain and plainspoken young woman. While she lounges in a field outside of her Yorkshire town home, she has an encounter with Tamsin. Tamsin is dark and exotic, attends a boarding school and meets Mona while she′s horseback riding. Though the two girls are completely different both socially and personally, an intense friendship develops over the summer. Where Tamsin is polished and educated, Mona is rough and inexperienced. Tamsin lives in a secluded mansion that looms over the town, Mona lives in a cluttered room above an abandoned pub. Each of the girls lives her own alienated life and possesses something the other desperately needs. From there the film follows the girls on their social and sexual awakening, using their blossoming relationship as a way of transcending class barriers and expected social mores. Director Pawel Pawlikowski is sensitive with his depiction of the girls vrites of passage, and subtle in his comment on the impossibility of maintaining Mona and Tamsin′s kind of emotional intensity in the modern world.