The film starts with Brenner (Jürgen), who is divorced, bringing his daughter to the airport to rejoin her mother. The daughter wants him to talk to her mother once more and say something, which is a kind of Leitmotiv for the film: "You never give in, why can't you give in this one time?"
Brenner is a policeman in Switzerland. Two of his colleagues, who went to a remote mountain village to look into a murder case to which their attention had been drawn by an anonymous letter, don't return and Brenner is sent to investigate. In order to get to the village, he has to go through a weird tunnel and as soon as he reaches the other side, he is in a completely different world: up in the mountain it is still deep winter and by now it is dark. Brenner has an accident with his car and the police come out to help him. He pretends to be a tourist and gets dropped at the only guesthouse of the village. After a first encounter with the village idiot, he meets the landlady in the stables delivering a calf. Very reluctantly she lets him have a room, which looks extremely cold.
On the next day, it gets clearer and clearer that strangers are not wanted here, especially, if they are from the city. Brenner watches a peculiar wedding party, where nobody seems very merry and the bride has a little boy with her. The bridegroom is the youngest of the village policemen. Brenner learns, that the bride, Theresa, is the sister of the murder victim, Sebastian, which started the whole investigation. Afterwards Brenner finds Vinzenz, the village idiot playing with a gadget, that belonged to one of his missing colleagues. It turns out, that Vinzenz knows, how and where the two policemen went missing, he takes Brenner there: their car was blown up and they ended dead in a gully, eaten by wolves!
After another very cold night in the village inn, Brenner goes on a hiking tour up the mountain to the farm, where Theresa came from. He listens on the window and hears the father talking about her being a whore and everybody having to do penance. The farm has a little lift for goods, in which Theresa is going back to the village. Brenner asks for a ride, which he only gets after some discussion with the father. On the ride down, he tries to question Theresa and even tells her, that he is a policeman and that he found his two colleagues dead, but asks her to keep quiet about it. Down in the village, the young policeman starts a quarrel with Brenner and Theresa, to prevent an escalation, tells that Brenner is a policeman from the city. Which doesn't really help to calm anybody down.
After this secret is out, Brenner starts seriously asking questions, especially to the idiot, who seems to know about the original murder too, Brenner even suspects him of being the murderer. Next morning, the idiot is dead, frozen to death in the fountain. Either driven to suicide by the accusations or killed. The enmity in the village towards Brenner rises. He finds his car telephone gone and telephone lines and radio in the village not working after an avalanche two weeks previously. When he tries to drive back to the city, the gate of the tunnel won't open and he has to return to the village.
In that night, he gets beaten up by some villagers while the policemen look on. Afterwards, when he nurses his wounds in a bath tub with the help of a bottle of schnapps, he has a conversation with the village priest. Brenner maintains that he has to continue his hunt for the murderer regardless of this opposition, because the law of the country demands that the murderer has to be tried and punished. The priest explains to him, that in the village they are far from living in anarchy, they live according to other, older laws, not even necessarily christian, that come from nature and that the villagers will deal with the case in their own way.
On the next day, Brenner goes up the mountain again to question Theresa's father, who is his next suspect. His methods are getting now every bit as ruthless, as those of the villagers dealing with him. Then another man, one of the three village policemen, who apparently was going to talk, gets killed.
In a last attempt to find out, what happened to Sebastian, Brenner takes Theresa up to the hut on the summer pasture, where the first murder happened two years ago. She says, that she will talk, if Brenner takes her away from the village, to which he agrees. In a look back (I don't know the technical term for this) we see, that Theresa and her brother Sebastian were lovers up on the summer pasture. They get caught in bed by their father, the idiot and Theresa's fiance, the young policeman. The father kills Sebastian and is about to kill Theresa too, when both the idiot and the policeman plead for her and the policeman says, that he will take her anyway.
The father killed Sebastian to wipe out the sin of the incest, but all the other murders were committed by the young policeman to prevent any outsider from finding out.
Back in the village, Brenner accuses the young policeman of the murders. The policeman goes completely mad, grabs Theresa's child (whose father is Sebastian) and drives away in his car, followed by Brenner and the last remaining village policeman. The young policeman gets killed, but the child survives.
Later that day, Theresa and Brenner come to an understanding and end up in bed. The father turns up in the village, but when Brenner wants to arrest him, the village policeman stops him. The father is going to take part in a ceremony next day and will give himself up afterwards. It is some ritual to drive out the demons of winter, in which normally a human sacrifice is only hinted at by one of the players being covered in blood (Der Blutige). But this time, the father, who is Der Blutige, as his penance, blows himself up. After this Theresa doesn't want to leave with Brenner anymore. He leaves alone. On the way to the tunnel, he suddenly sees Theresa on the road and in order not to hit her, he has an accident and loses consciousness. Theresa says "You killed us all but I wanted to go with you" and leaves him to the approaching wolves!
In this moment, when the wolves start scratching at the car windows, Brenner wakes up in his bed in the city. It seems, everything has just been a nightmare until he finds Theresa's little boy in his daughter's room! The End.