A group of ten people, strangers to one another, arrive at a hotel deep in the Iranian desert, located adjacent to the ruins of Persepolis, 200 miles from civilization.

At dinner, they notice a display of figurines: the Ten Little Indians, representing the doggerel in each of their suites.

By means of a tape recording made by their host, he accuses each of them of being responsible for the deaths of certain people and of having escaped justice.

The next morning, Elsa's husband, the butler Martino, attempts to escape through the desert and dies of heat exhaustion, his survival kit having been sabotaged.

Vera and Charles assume Armstrong is the killer, but then find his corpse in the ruins and that he has been dead for hours.

Vera returns to the hotel, where she finds all the furniture covered in sheets again, except for a chair with a noose above.

Cannon tries to convince Vera to hang herself, to avoid spending the rest of her life in jail, since the authorities will assume she is the obvious murderer, as the only remaining guest alive.

With Cannon dead, Vera and Charles are picked up by a helicopter as the tape recording replays over the end credits.

[4] The European cut of the film featured a pre-credit sequence that showed the guests arriving by plane before boarding a helicopter to be transported to the hotel.

[9][10] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "And Then There Were None is the third movie adaptation of Agatha Christie's variously titled novel of retribution on an island off the Devon coast. ...

This multi-national adaptation, however, dilutes the original by transplanting the action to an unspecified locale, substituting an unrelated cast of jet-set characters, adding a happy end and, worst of all, neglecting the victims' relationships in favour of lingering shots of Iranian ruins, while the somnolent cast wanders about the Shah Abbas hotel in Isfahan (a huge gold and mosaic affair which could have hidden a dozen Mr. Owen's).

The staging of the murders – which are awaited without visible concern – reaches its nadir when Oliver Reed desperately belabours the patently rubber snake which has just bitten Stéphane Audran; the film's opportunism is most evident when Aznavour sits down to the piano, minutes before being poisoned, for a quick after-dinner rendition of 'Dance in the Old-Fashioned Way'.