Subsequently, Dubrovnik is annexed by the NDH and brought under a brutal dictatorship by the Ustashe, which divides the locals: Toni becomes a fascist, Miho is kicked out of his fencing club, while Niko and his father Baldo become anti-fascists and join the communist resistance.

In one raid, the Ustashe round up a dozen dissidents, mostly Jews and one Orthodox priest who preached in Russian, and take them by bus out of the city into the wilderness, slaughtering them.

Baldo is arrested for publicly expressing his contempt for the fascist movement, and dies in an attempt to escape deportation to a concentration camp.

At the same time, it stirred controversy in Yugoslavia because of its non-ideological portrayal of the German and Italian occupation during World War II, and because of explicit violence and sexuality.

Critic Damir Radić wrote for Filmski Leksikon: "With a stylistically refined expression, Lordan Zafranović shapes his constant theme of individual and collective evil, focusing this time on the repression of Croatian and Italian fascists, staged in a naturalistic-grotesque key, with a climax in the famous sequence of the massacre in the bus.

The intriguingly announced elaboration of the characters and their relationships (especially the erotic triangle with incestuous implications of Niko - Anna - Toni, and the class-gender turn in the relationship between Niko - Mara) remains unfulfilled, and the ambitious attempt to portray a comprehensive social frescoes with patriotic citizens in the foreground (a thematic innovation in Yugoslav film at the time) only partially succeeded.