The film opens like a "whodunit" with a murder sequence shot in flaming red. The victim, a prostitute Katarina, the murderer an upper-middleclass businessman, Peter Egerman. The remainder of the film is a series of flashback sequences shot in black and white examining his life. In the final part, the murder sequence is repeated in colour as his life comes full circle.

The construction of the film is a series of conversations tracing Peter's attempts to come to terms with his marriage and his feeling of loneliness and alienation. The scenes are short and fragmented like an incomplete puzzle. No one character provides the answer to the psychological state which has turned him into a murderer.

One by one, the people he has been associated with appear before the camera. We see them merely as portraits and are given no details of their history. We meet Peter's friend, a psychiatrist; his wife, who shares a name with the murdered prostitute, his mother; and his wife's gay colleague, Tim. All of them are indirectly related to the catastrophe or rather imply a possible reason for the mental collapse and act of violence. The psychiatrist betrayed his confidence and had an affair with his wife. His wife exposed him to humiliation and taunting love-hatred. His mother was overly possessive. Tim, disclosing his own despair and loneliness suggests Peter's latent homosexuality. There are also indications of childhood traumas which haunt the sensitive Peter. The final vignette shows him in a cell cuddling his childhood teddy bear.