A young man searches for his loved one in a city thrust into chaos by the sudden arrival of a mysterious and threatening alien presence.

The corpse of a fruit farmer is found in a meadow orchard. It was buried upside down, draped like a scarecrow. The spectacular staging of the murder leads Commissioner Maris Bächle and her colleague Konrad Diener to suspect a personal motive. While the black asylum seeker is quickly suspected as a perpetrator, the Freudenstadt inhabitants speculate behind closed doors about the involvement of earth spirits - of course, just for fun. However, when Konrad Diener's introverted 14-year-old son disappears without a trace in the forest during a school trip and reappears completely changed, but refuses to give any information about his whereabouts, Maris remembers how she was found in the forest as an 8-year-old. She had mysteriously survived there. With the help of the city archivist, the two investigators come across an old legend about forest spirits and an old place of execution in the middle of the forest. The forest court once met in this mystical place. Apparently it is active again.

Occupied France, 1942. Gilles is arrested by SS soldiers alongside other Jews and sent to a camp in Germany. He narrowly avoids sudden execution by swearing to the guards that he is not Jewish, but Persian. This lie temporarily saves him, but Gilles gets assigned a life-or-death mission: to teach Farsi to Head of Camp Koch, who dreams of opening a restaurant in Iran once the war is over. Through an ingenious trick, Gilles manages to survive by inventing words of "Farsi" every day and teaching them to Koch.