- Two men attracted to the same woman are attending a trip with her in the Mountains during the bird hunting season. A triangular love drama ending with tragedy. Or is it, really?
- The opening credits follow a car as it heads down the road to the accompaniment of a jazz quintet. When the film begins, it begins at the end, with a coffin being taken down from the countryside to the village. A constable tells the camera that there are two men and one woman involved in an accidental shooting. Suddenly the three of them appear onscreen one at a time, Bjørn (Rolf Søder) and Knut (Tor Stokke) with their rifles, and Guri (Bente Børsum) taking a snapshot of them posing, as the narrator takes us back to the beginning. He tells the audience that Guri is the lover of Knut but she emphatically tells the camera its not true, followed by saying shes lying. As they embark on their hunt, the narrator turns it over to Bjørn, who talks about the dogs, and when they flush out some birds and one is killed, Guri says she doesnt like it. Then Knut addresses the camera and tells the audience that the trip is important for him and begins to argue, in the voiceover, with Bjørn. Knut gets the next bird, and in his mind its symbolic of his attempt to get Guri. Bjørn had his chance, he figures, but Bjørn still thinks Guri hasnt made up her mind yet between the two of them.
When they sit down to rest the narrator says that the audience doesnt know enough about the three of them and so she thinks back to the trip out in the car when Knut accidentally killed a sheep on the road. Bjørn drinks the animals blood and Guri throws up out the window. The narrator asks him why, but Bjørn tells him to shut up. Instead of a hunting ground, Bjørn now sees the wilderness as a battleground where two men will fight over the woman. A duel. Back on the hunt the two men shoot at a bird simultaneously and argue about who made the kill, which Bjørn takes as a provocation on the others part. Then Guri thinks back to a conversation between the two she overheard the night before where Bjørn threatened to kill Knut over her. That night, when Knut doesnt come back, she thinks Bjørn may have actually killed him. But he turns up eventually. When Guri tries to understand whats going on, she thinks back to her marriage with Bjørn. The two men were old friends and at their engagement party Bjørn didnt want to dance and so she danced with Knut. Thats when she believes the struggle between the two friends began.
One day, after a dinner party the couple throws for Knut, he calls and wants to see Guri alone. He confesses his love for her, and when she tells her husband that night he says hes known for years but hes not worried about it. Bjørn has invited Knut on a hunting trip and Guri doesnt want to go along, for obvious reasons. She sees Knut the next day to ask him not to go, but of course he refuses. And later when hes out with Bjørn he sees her keys left in the lock of the car and takes them. But when he gives them back to Bjørn, the husband mistakenly believes there is something more going on with Knut than there actually is and confronts Guri the next morning. She is hurt by the accusation but has absolutely no idea how he got the keys. In her depression, a dissolve suddenly goes back to the cabin. Bjørn and Knut are rolling dice to see who will go to get supplies at the village and Bjørn loses. He doesnt want to leave his wife alone with Knut and so he had planned on her coming with him, but she refused. He doesnt know why she wont go, but he heads out early the next morning so he can get back before dark.
Bjørn hikes back to the car with one of his dogs and all he can think about is the two of them together. Back at the cabin Knut teases Guri for not going along like a good wife should, implying that shes not a good wife because shed rather be with him. She doesnt want to go out hunting with him, and asks him how they can protect themselves from thoughts they shouldnt be having. He says they dont need to, and she eventually goes with him. Walking together, Knut believes he has won, but believes he has to be patient in order not to ruin it. When they stop to rest she asks him pointedly why he believes he has the right to act this way toward her. He had been thinking the same thing, but couldnt explain it to her so, overwhelmed with desire, he throws himself upon her and kisses her. Then she pushed him off and runs away. He follows, but she wasnt heading back to the cabin. When he realizes they are back on the hunt as if nothing had happened, he still doesnt know the answer to her question, and they talk to themselves in voice-over. He wonders if shes thinking of Bjorn, but shes not.
As two partridges are flushed, she follows them with her gun and suddenly she stops, aiming at Knuts back. He turns, and more than anything she wants to fire, but cant pull the trigger. Instead of being afraid he takes it as a sign and kisses her again. This time she lets him. But then suddenly the shepherd appears. Meanwhile Bjørn is racing back as fast as he can but is slowed by a milk truck making deliveries. Knut, on their way back to the cabin, remembers back to the first time he met Guri, alone on a tennis court in Oslo. She wasnt sure she should, but decided to play a little with him. Knut clearly had his hopes up, but when Bjørn arrived he made it obvious to Knut that she was his. It turns out, though, that Bjørn didnt know her either. He found out later that Bjørn had tricked him, but from that day forward he had never stopped thinking about her, and instead just pretended to be her friend. He tried going abroad for a couple of years, but he missed Oslo, and her, and eventually returned.
Back at the cabin, as darkness falls, Guri is anxious for Bjørn to arrive. But the car has broken down and Bjørn asks the shepherd to get it fixed while he begins the long walk back to the cabin, not figuring to arrive before dawn. Knut and Guri dance together to the radio after dinner, but she is clearly uncomfortable being alone with him. He, on the other hand, is ecstatic that she is his for the moment, and yet wants desperately to know how she feels. Bjørn, walking back, feels he has lost his wife, doubting himself all the way. As Knut and Guri prepare to sleep, he advances on her, but she resists. When Bjørn arrives at the cabin he finds Knut in their bed and his wife sleeping alone on the floor. She has left dinner for him on the stove. Then he kicks Knut out and takes her to bed with him, but he has imagined the worst.
When Bjørn wakes up the next morning and shes not in bed, he immediately wonders if shes with Knut. But hes alone in his sleeping bag, and so Bjørn thinks to himself that he doesnt have to kill him yet. She is out by herself at the waters edge, but realizes that her actions when she returns have the possibility of determining life and death. When she returns she takes a picture of the two. The kiss of Knut still burns in her while Bjørns jealousy is tearing her apart. They immediately return to hunting that morning without talking about anything. Guri compares the tension to an abscess that needs to be lanced. The dogs flush out some more birds, but as the three of them are tracking them with their guns she accidentally shoots Bjørn. Before he dies, however, he asks her if it really was an accident. Knut hefts the body on his shoulders and begins carrying him back to the cabin while Guri stumbles along behind him in a daze. Knut yells at her to see if hes still alive, to see if his body is cold yet, but she can barely move.
The scene then shifts to a courtroom. With no incriminating evidence, the judge declares a dismissal. Knut leaves, and now Guri is alone, without either of them, alone with her secret that she is pregnant. As she turns and walks away from the camera the narrator says this is not a good way to end the story. Then a woman runs into the frame asking who the father is, and a group of people join her and accost Guri, demanding to know. The woman says the audience has a right to know. When Guri runs out into the street to escape them, a car comes rushing at her with its horn blaring and the scene dissolves into Guris bedroom, with Knut outside honking the horn of their car and yelling that theyre leaving in ten minutes. Hes dangling the keys to her car that she misplaced. And when she turns around to look back at the bed and sees Bjørn she realizes that the hunting trip has all been a dream . . . or a nightmare.
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