Six weeks before his death in 1890, Vincent van Gogh painted a portrait of his physician, Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, a work the artist called "the heartbroken expression of our time." In 1990, exactly a century later, the portrait sold at a New York auction for 82 million dollars, then the highest price ever paid for a painting, before vanishing into private hands. This film follows investigators tracing the canvas through the US, France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, interviewing dealers, collectors, and art historians who know pieces of the trail but not the whole picture, and some who simply will not talk. Along the way it lays out how the elite end of the art market operates, where ownership can be hidden for decades and a masterpiece can effectively disappear from public view. It also traces the strange emotional pull the painting exerts on people who have owned, sold, or simply searched for it, turning a missing-object story into a study of obsession and secrecy in the high-end art trade.