In the summer of his nineteenth year, Giulio has decided not to go away: he will spend his vacation at home, helping his parents with their work in the vegetable garden. In the house next door, empty for some time, arrives Lia, a twenty-year-old girl. Giulio would like to get to know her, but she is sullen and introverted. One day Giulio is swimming in the lake and Lia plays at drowning him. Giulio is a regular guy, sensitive and polite to a fault. Attracted to her, he starts thinking about her day and night. Lia initiates him into strange and increasingly dangerous "games." The girl won't talk about herself though. She has told him she came alone to spend her vacation in the old family home, where she hadn't been since she was a child. But Lia has secrets to keep and won't let anyone set foot in the old and abandoned house.

Rome, 1990. The night Italy's national football team is eliminated from the World Cup by Argentina on penalty kicks, a well-known film producer is found dead in the Tiber river. The main suspects for the murder are three young aspiring screenwriters, who–promptly taken to the police–start to tell their version of the story.