Monsignor Tommaso is an ambitious priest whose life at the Vatican is interrupted when Susan, the lover he deserted fifteen years earlier in Australia, tells him that their daughter has disappeared. Guided by Aboriginal tribesman Willie, Tommaso discovers another world in the Australian outback, where mysticism and tribal magic are prevalent.
Though the film is constructed as a thriller (Tommaso's daughter goes missing in a part of the country being menaced by a serial killer), it also has conscious fantasy elements, in Tommaso's dreams of an Indigenous Australian man whom he later meets in person in Australia and in the way in which his former lover's pleas for help penetrate his sub-conscious despite his life of isolation in the Vatican City.