Set during the Bosnian War, the film tells the story of Milan, part of a small group of Serb soldiers trapped in a tunnel by a Bosniak force.

Through flashbacks, the lives of the trapped soldiers in pre-war Yugoslavia are shown, particularly Milan and his Bosniak best friend Halil becoming enemies after having to pick opposing sides in the conflict.

The plot is inspired by a real-life occurrence in eastern Bosnia from the opening stages of the Bosnian War, with the film's screenplay based on a Vanja Bulić-written, Duga magazine published long-form piece about the actual event.

The main timeframe includes the "present" with a hospitalized Milan, with flashbacks to both his childhood and his early adulthood in the 1980s until the war begins, and subsequent service as a soldier where he is trapped in the tunnel.

Cut to 1980, not even a decade after its opening, the tunnel has already fallen in disrepair as two local village kids Milan and Halil are playing in its vicinity although they don't dare go inside it because—as they fearfully repeat a local tall tale to one another while staring into the dilapidated structure—"drekavac (an ogre from Slavic mythology) sleeps inside and if he awakens he would kill everyone in the village and burn down their homes".

Cut forward to the spring of 1992, as sporadic violent incidents that would eventually spiral into an all-out war are taking place throughout Bosnia, Milan (Dragan Bjelogrlić), a Serb, and his best friend Halil (Nikola Pejaković), a Muslim Bosniak, both in their late teens, are still in their ethnically-mixed village in eastern Bosnia, playing one-on-one streetball on a makeshift hoop in front of a kafana owned by another Serb villager Slobo (Petar Božović).

Although the two friends are still very warm and affable towards each other, the talk of war is in the air and a degree of tension along ethnoreligious lines is felt, indicating mutual mistrust and apprehension among their respective ethnic groups.

Milan shoots three of the profiteers out of anger after they set fire to the auto-repair shop he and Halil had built together, wounding them, and is then shocked to find Slobo is looting the property too.

Milan, Velja, Professor, Fork, Laza, and Gvozden enter the tunnel and fight off the Bosniak fighters, however the group become trapped as they will be shot if they leave.

The majority of the scenes were shot on locations in and around Višegrad, Republika Srpska (Serb inhabited entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, still governed by Radovan Karadžić) at the time, often in places that were former battlefields.

[5][6] In addition to FR Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), the only other former Yugoslav countries where the movie had an official theatrical distribution were Slovenia and Macedonia.

Even before wider distribution in North America, the film received notices in major American newspapers such as Los Angeles Times and Toledo Blade, which covered it from the Bosnian War angle.

Variety's Emanuel Levy penned a glowing review calling the film "wilder in its black humor than MASH, bolder in its vision of politics and the military than any movie Stanley Kubrick has made, and one of the most audacious antiwar statements ever committed to the big screen".

[17] The New York Times' Lawrence Van Gelder gave kudos to Dragojević for "unleashing a powerful assault on the insanity of the war that pitted Serb against Muslim in Bosnia" and praised the film as "a clear, well-meaning, universal appeal to reason".

[20] Gerald Peary wrote in April 1998 that Dragojević "creates a crass, unsentimental, muscular guys' world on the way to his vivid condemnation of the Bosnian War".