Young couple Eva and Jarda Tům face housing shortages just as Eva miraculously gives birth to quintuplets, drawing intense media and state attention. Authorities install them in a high-tech villa monitored by a commission led by Drahoslav Svitáček. As intrusive experiments, constant scrutiny, and malfunctioning gadgets strain their family life, a planned railway project momentarily frees them. Eva conceives again, but when only one baby arrives amid fading public interest, the state and the spotlight move on.

The protagonist (Rudolf Hrusinsky) is a dull, fat, shy government clerk indulging in voyuerism and ego fantasies. In love with another clerk (Kveta Fiolova), he is urged on in his pursuit by a commiserate executive. The story is told in a flashback sequence as the cuckolded Hrusinsky attempts suicide by gassing himself in his bathtub. The "Murder" of the title is not a murder as such, rather the murder that Hrusinsky remembers planning upon discovering his wife's unfaithfulness with his supposed friend and advisor. Both plots failing in his mind, he loses himself in fantastic reveries of his funeral and of hypocritical mourners. ' Deciding (perhaps) that this is not the way out either, he gives up the attempt and imagines a life of reconciliation and eventual affluence.