A wife with a fertility problem wants to use her sister's womb to have children, but her sister is enjoying her boyfriend and sexual freedom. The husband is a commanding chauvinist and this soon turns out to be an investigation into authority, patriarchy and conservatism vs. free love and youth culture.

Based on the factual case of a young man who broke into a nurses' home in Chicago, mutilating and killing several of the inmates, Wakamatsu's film is a precise, sad delineation of a particular aspect of masculine sexual consciousness.