A couple of bourgeois intellectuals, Carlo and Silvia, have been married for twenty years. While she lives in their flat in Rome, he spends most of his time in the country house where he writes his books, openly living with his younger lover, Lù. In return, Carlo has long accepted that her wife may have lovers, but her volatile relationship with a young neo-fascist suddenly rekindles his jealousy.
A group of tenants and visitors are trapped in a 10-story high-rise apartment building infested with demons who proceed to hunt the dwindling humans down.
Pasquale Baudaffi, on amnesty, comes out of prison and starts looking for a job with the help of his cousin Gaetano. But first he goes to what was once a brothel, but, unbeknownst to our hapless hero, has been taken over and rented as a dental office. Pasquale finds himself at the center of endless misunderstandings. He tries to be a gamekeeper but that's not okay, he tries to be a waiter in a bar: he immediately gets his orders wrong and he is fired. His performance as a garage keeper was negative. The very latest experience is in an electronics company but its insertion into the futuristic mechanism triggers the craziest complications. The encounter with a lost dog allows him to get to know his mistress and thus discover the woman of his life.
Rossellini takes numerous liberties with the original source material, rearranging and omitting events at will, presenting everything in a highly undramatic fashion. The film begins in the time of the Old Testament, allowing Rossellini to present the story of Jesus in its ancient, historic context.
Lise, a mentally unbalanced middle-aged woman, travels from her home in London to Rome, Italy where she embarks on a fatal destiny that she had helped to arrange for herself — a premeditated search for someone, anyone, with whom she could form a dangerous liaison.
After unearthing an ancient bas-relief sculpture of the gradiva or ‘woman who walks’ a young archaeologist begins to dream of the figure eluding him, while also pursuing a mysterious woman who eludes him in his waking life. Based on the novella by Wilhelm Jensen.
