Manuel’s mother, Petra, lives in Berlin. She is in a coma as a result of chemotherapy treatment. Tarso and Petra have been divorced since Manuel (17) was 5 years old.
Manuel and Tarso come to Germany to be with Petra during her illness. They are staying together in her old apartment. Another woman also occasionally lives there: K., a beautiful, enigmatic and aloof Asian. Petra’s disease is of no interest to Manuel whereas Tarso visits Petra obsessively in the clinic. Sharing the same space with Tarso is hard for Manuel. Their previous relationship was based on "visits only". Manuel is overcome by a sense of emptiness.
Meanwhile, Manuel develops an erotic desire for K., in fact, a transsexual, who helps him discover Petra's body...

What are we speaking about when we talk of "the taboo of death"? Death is omnipresent on our television screens. This death, however, is always far from us. It’s the death of others, in Darfur or Bosnia. This kind of death is not taboo. The taboo relates specifically to an intimate death: the death that each of us will experience profoundly and hurts us at the deepest level: The death of our friends and families.
It’s intimate because it brings us closer to our own feelings and this is precisely what taboo is. The taboo on death is then a taboo on intimacy. Our society avoids this inwardness, burying it as far as possible. This is one of the key themes in "Red Cross": The relation our society has with the sick body and illness and how we have unlearned to listen or touch it.