A young Londoner gets into an accident and, finding himself in intensive care, soon receives eight and a half million pounds from a certain company on the condition of non-disclosure of the circumstances of the disaster. After being discharged from the hospital, the hero systematically spends time and money to become “real” again and regain lost emotional contact with reality. With the help of hired performers, he reconstructs episodes of his past life, trying to repeat not only entire fragments of the urban landscape, but also the smell of fried liver, the sounds of a piano coming from the apartment opposite, the silhouettes of cats on the roof of a neighboring house. When this does not help to completely restore the former sense of authenticity, the hero embarks on increasingly risky experiments with reality...