These scenes are juxtaposed against a narrative following the fictional housewife Věra, who is discontented and overwhelmed by housework as she struggles to take care of her misbehaving son Mydla and her inattentive husband Josef, eventually resorting to a similarly unsatisfying affair with Jirka.

Meanwhile, Věra's marriage almost collapses as her husband reveals that he is also having an affair, and tells her that they should divorce, although a final scene shows her together with family.

Something Different has been described as a cinematic breakthrough alongside Black Peter and The Cry, discarding the morality tales of earlier socialist cinema and replacing them with frank depictions of everyday life, in addition to breaking with other traditional conventions of film form.

[7] Similarly, Something Different is an example of Chytilová's use of the style of cinema verite in her early career, contrasted against more allegorical works such as Daisies and Fruit of Paradise.

[1] A review in The New Yorker called it "radically and thrillingly different from more or less any film that was being made at the time", praising its camerawork and subject matter.