After achieving only moderate academic results and making numerous unsuccessful attempts to find a job, Somnath (Pradip Mukherjee), the central protagonist struggles in his daily life.

One day while Somnath was walking down a lane in the crowded Burrabazar area of urban Kolkata, he slips over a banana peel, and coincidentally meets Bishuda(Utpal Dutt).

[2] Jonathan Rosenbaum of The Chicago Reader considers it to have "the best performances of any Ray film I've seen and a milieu that may remind you of both Billy Wilder's The Apartment and John Cassavetes's Faces.

She concludes that the film "evokes an insidious amorality that he sees as an inevitable side effect of the huge pressures from within the family and outside to get ahead and make something of oneself.

He writes that the "film’s most brutal scenes": "Ray literally, and perhaps for the first time in his filmmaking career, bares his fangs and pokes us in the eye to show us what a strange and hopeless world we live in.

Shot beautifully in black and white, with the use of light to symbolically cover only one half of most faces in the night scenes, juxtaposing the ruthless streets and markets against a loving and caring sister-in-law at home who supports him no matter what, and once again focusing on the human content more than the external glamour, Ray puts Somnath in a world of shocks and surprises, only to make him realise, that beginning right from education, to employment, to entrepreneurship, there is no country for an honest man.

"[6] Times of India shared a similar view, calling the "film’s climax [...] an out and out shocker in which Somnath faces a startling dilemma of epic proportions, and just like Ray visualizes he fails to choose the right path, and he is now neither noble, nor a hero.