Marthe and Michel live with their three children in a house next to an uncompleted highway. They use the deserted road as a recreation area. For example, they put an inflatable swimming pool on it and the son and his friends use the highway to ride their bicycles. After living for ten years close to the highway, they believe that it will not be completed. One day, without warning, construction workers begin to upgrade the road and the highway opens to traffic. Instead of leaving the house, the family stay, despite noise from passing traffic. Previously, the father would simply walk across the highway in order to access his car to get to work. This becomes harder as the highway becomes busier. He and his children eventually have to use a tunnel in order to access the outside world. Their younger daughter, Marion, becomes obsessed about the quality and cleanliness of her surroundings. She monitors the grass as it exhibits the effects of carbon monoxide emissions and is convinced that the family may fall ill or even die prematurely, as a consequence of living in such close proximity to the highway. The elder daughter, Judith, continues to sunbathe on the front lawn, despite attracting unwanted attention from passing motorists. One day, she decides to leave home. Returning after a period, accompanied by a man who is apparently her boyfriend, she finds the house bricked-up and, after an unsuccessful attempt to find an entrance, leaves again. The remaining family had sound-proofed the house. This includes blocking up all the windows and sealing all the ventilation points. Confined, the pressure begins to take its toll and, in what appears to be a death dream, they break outof the house into the sunlit outdoors.
Director Ursula Meier searched for a suitable location across Europe, before finding a spot in Bulgaria. The road itself was already under construction and they then built the house next to the then-unused road. Meier wrote the script specifically for Isabelle Huppert before she was cast. Huppert was given the script while she was in Belgium, working on Joachim Lafosse's film Private Property.
Reception
, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, reported an average score of 67, based on 12 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
