Police say otherwise, but scientist Smilla Jaspersen (Julia Ormond) thinks her young neighbor was chased by an adult before he fell to his death. An Inuit who spent her childhood in Greenland, Smilla learns that the boy's father died while working for Dr. Andreas Tork (Richard Harris) in Greenland. After sharing her murder theory with an increasingly mysterious friend called The Mechanic (Gabriel Byrne), she heads back to Greenland in the hope of finding a link between the deaths.