The attractive Agnes receives crushing news at her home in Toronto--her mother Rose is gravely ill. So Agnes decides to return to her small town home of Sydney, Nova Scotia There she encounters her older sister Theresa, an intolerant bigoted Catholic, who has been abandoned by her husband for a younger woman, and Louise, who has shut herself off in her own world in which no emotions exist, only the television whose channels she flicks through. Agnes′ return home awakens all sorts of forgotten demons from the past. Why does she travel to a nearby village to see the 15-year-old Joanie? What attracts the young woman to this girl? And what happened to the sisters′ father? Their mother′s health deteriorates and the three women realise that the period of their common existence is fast coming to an end. But the question remains: are they to make any sound at all in the artificial silence they created so long ago?