In 1859, a meteorite streaks across the sky and crashes into the Gela Alta glacier in western Greenland, causing a massive explosion that kills an Inuit fisherman. In present day Copenhagen, Smilla Jasperson, a transplanted Greenlander, is studying ice crystals at a university lab. An Arctic ice specialist, Smilla is uncredentialed and unemployed with a troubled past. She returns to her apartment complex to find the body of her neighbour, Isaiah Christiansen, a six-year-old Inuit boy, lying dead in the snow.