Given Father's youthfulness, he and Aleksei seem to understand each other, yet their life experiences separate them, and over the course of the film a rift gradually develops between them, that rift and Aleksei's reaction to it becoming the source of his subsequent nightmares.
The Father is a former combat helicopter pilot, and Aleksei attends military school where he is studying to become a sports trainer. A father (Father) and his son Aleksei share a roof-top apartment in an unidentified seaside city.
