[3] The film's plot follows a group of university students, led by the central character Violette, who engage in enigmatic rituals at a café called Eden.

A group of university students meet after class at a café called Eden, where they perform enigmatic rituals and games—such as a simulated Russian roulette or pretending one of them has been poisoned to death.

He asks them to pick up broken glass pieces with bare hands and heals the resulting cut wounds instantly, a trick he says he learned in Africa.

Violette recovers the painting and finds Dutchman dead at the foot of a staircase by the sea, which reminds her of the place where she found Duchemin's body earlier.

However, after the commercial underperformance of The Man Who Lies (1968), he considered to quit filmmaking because he felt making films in black-and-white was no longer viable in the industry.

[7][8] Robbe-Grillet described the result as a mixture of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Marquis de Sade's Justine, with certain components taken from the chivalric romance.