Sussie is 15, raised with her alcoholic mother and an absent father. She has lived in several foster homes. Now she gets one last chance with a new family, the Lindgren's who live in a large house by the sea.
Desperate to be free from her drunken, unloving mother Diane, the beautiful, scheming young Mini seduces her stepfather Martin and soon convinces him to join her in a sadistic scheme to have Diane declared insane.
Aviva is thirteen, awkward and sensitive. Her mother Joyce is warm and loving, as is her father, Steve, a regular guy who does have a fierce temper from time to time.
Tulgaa returns to his native village to care for his dying stepfather, honouring his remaining commitments by offering to lend a hand with the summer harvest.
Blessed with a keen sense of smell and cursed with a philandering pornographer husband, a parasitic mother, and a pair of delinquent children, the long-suffering Francine Fishpaw turns to the bottle as her life falls apart -- until deliverance appears in the form of a hunk named Todd Tomorrow.
Georgia Benfield, at her wit's end, loses control and begins physically abusing her elderly mother, just as Georgia had been abused herself as a child.
Jessica's promising debut as a young artist is shattered by a sudden and violent death. She escapes into a restless succession of journeys whose encounters along the way bring humour, some comfort, but also danger.
Maria since childhood was directed by her father to become a nun. As a result of her father's cultivation of a rigid appreciation, Maria always feels awkward, including the delinquency that is common for a girl.
In this film, Humbert is on the trail of his own history. Wolfsgrub is the name of the house where Humbert's mother lives, and though she is getting on in years, she becomes young again as she answers her son's questions.
Something very common in our days, an adolescent who does not find communication with her mother or stepfather falls into a depression that drags her down paths of difficult return.