While working as an art restorer, Alan Curtis becomes haunted by cries from beneath the ground and is led to a small damaged painting by the "Master of Oppenheim", a medieval German painter, nearly all of whose pictures have been lost. A chance encounter with Phil, a young girl trying to escape from her family sends them both on a journey of discovery to Oppenheim itself, where they begin to feel they must have shared a past life together. The answer lies in a cellar behind the walls of which two lovers are buried. As history is revealed, Alan and Phil find themselves under threat both from the ghosts of the past and the treachery of the present.