In a Shanghai prison, the director is about to carry out the execution of a prisoner. According to habit, he decides to stage these last moments of a life like a play. Just as he is asking the detainee to choose how he would like to die, the prisoner takes advantage of the situation and escapes via the labyrinthine prison halls. While the guards attempt to catch him, an inspector arrives unexpectedly on the scene. Himself once on death row in the same facility, he owes his life to the former executioner, who has since become a gardener. Banquets, alcohol, hide and-go-seek games and sex lead the prison director to lose all sense of personal limitation. He is now sure of his absolute power over this tiny world. But the morning execution that the inspector is preparing may well be the director’s…...

This allegorical film is a veritable social satire about death and the death penalty.
The story turns principally on the ancient slaughterhouses constructed in Shanghai in 1933 that went on to be transformed into a prison. Designed by an English architect in a perfect Art Deco style, this elegant building is a complex and strange confusion of shapes and levels. This building ultimately becomes one of the characters in the film.
By contrast, certain scenes that take place outside the prison unfold in the hundred-year-old circular houses of the province of Fujian. Partly constructed of mud, these dwellings contrast with the angular and harsh materials of the slaughterhouses.