[3] The film tells the story of four friends who gather in a villa for the weekend, with the express purpose of eating themselves to death.

The second is Philippe, a somewhat important magistrate who still lives with his childhood nanny, Nicole, who is overprotective of him to the point of trying to prevent him from having relationships with other women, and who fulfills her own sexual needs with him.

There they find the old caretaker, Hector, who has innocently prepared everything for the great feast, and a Chinese visitor who is there to offer a job to the magistrate in faraway China, which Philippe politely rejects with the phrase "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes" ("Beware of Greeks bearing gifts"), quoting Virgil.

They discuss organizing a little "feminine presence" and decide to invite three prostitutes to come to the house the following evening (not four, because Philippe does not want to participate).

Their breakfast next day is interrupted by the arrival of a school class who would like to visit the garden of the villa to see the famous "linden tree of Boileau", under which the French poet used to sit while looking for inspiration.

He becomes exasperated, and realizing the futility of the farce, decides to leave the house at night during a snow storm, in the old Bugatti that he had repaired earlier in the day with great delight.

Philippe goes off to bed, leaving Andrea to keep Ugo company during his determined effort to eat the entire pâté.

The last to die is the diabetic Philippe, on the bench under the lime-tree of Boileau and into the arms of Andrea, after eating a pudding she has made shaped like a pair of breasts.

The delivery men react with incomprehension when Andrea instructs them to leave the meat – whole animals, and sides of pork and beef – in the garden (the kitchen and the cold room now containing the bodies of Ugo, Marcello and Michel).

The film ends bizarrely with a scene of the garden filled with dogs who begin chasing and dining on the poultry and meat carcasses.