Plot
A French bourgeois couple, François and Simone Thévenot, accompany François's colleague Don Rafael Acosta (the ambassador from the South American nation of Miranda) and Simone's sister Florence to the house of the Sénéchals, the hosts of a dinner party. Alice Sénéchal is surprised to see them, explaining that she expected them the following evening and has no dinner prepared. The would-be guests then invite Alice to join them for dinner at a nearby inn. There, a waitress informs them that the restaurant is under new management. There are no diners inside, and the party hurriedly departs shortly after discovering a vigil for the manager, who died a few hours earlier, in an adjoining room.
Acosta, François, and Alice's husband Henri meet the next day at the Mirandan embassy to discuss the proceeds of a large cocaine deal. Acosta sees a young woman selling clockwork-animal toys outside; he shoots one of the toys with a rifle and the woman runs off. He explains that she is part of a Maoist Mirandan terrorist group that has been targeting him for months.
Two days later, the friends arrive at the Sénéchals' for lunch, but Henri and Alice escape to the garden to have sex instead of joining them. Acosta deduces that the Sénéchals know the police are coming and have fled to avoid arrest for their involvement in drug trafficking, prompting the group to leave in a panic.
When the Sénéchals return from the garden to find the rest of the group gone, they meet a bishop who has donned their gardener's clothing. They throw him out, but when he returns wearing his bishop's robes, they embrace him with deference. The bishop asks to work for them as their gardener. He tells them that when he was a child, his parents were poisoned with arsenic and the culprit was never apprehended.
The women visit a teahouse, where a soldier tells them about his childhood. Following his mother's death, his cold-hearted father sent him to military school. The ghost of the soldier's mother informed him that the man was not his real father but his father's killer; they had dueled over her. She asks her son to poison the culprit, and he complies.
Simone meets Acosta, with whom she is having an affair, at his apartment. They retreat to his bedroom to have sex but are interrupted by a visit from François, whereupon she makes a convenient excuse and leaves with him. Acosta is then visited by the terrorist, who has come to kill him. He ambushes and chastises her, and tells her to leave after she refuses his sexual advances. As she leaves, he signals to agents waiting across the street, who capture her.
The group convenes at the Sénéchals' for dinner, but are interrupted by the arrival of an army regiment, who join the dinner only to be called away for alarmingly close maneuvers. The colonel invites them to his house in return; Henri dreams that the colonel's dining room is a stage set in a theatrical performance where the audience is angry with the actors for not knowing their lines. François dreams that, at the dinner, the colonel badgers Acosta about the political situation in Miranda, culminating in Acosta shooting the colonel.
The bishop is called away from gardening to give absolution to a dying gardener, who confesses to poisoning his former employers due to their mistreatment of him. Realizing that the employers were his parents, the bishop finishes giving the gardener absolution before fatally shooting him with a shotgun.
The Sénéchals, the Thévenots, and Acosta are arrested for drug trafficking. The police chief dreams that the ghost of a former inspector killed in retribution for torturing a student protestor releases the traffickers. He wakes up from the dream to learn that the Interior Minister has ordered them to be released. Acosta dreams that they return to the Sénéchals' for dinner but are shot by a rival gang of drug traffickers from Marseille. After waking up, he walks to the kitchen and sloppily eats leftovers stored in the refrigerator.
A recurring scene of the six people walking silently and purposefully on an isolated country road is also the final sequence.
