The film is described as a play for dancers rather than as a ballet. Four women are shown moving round a narrow and closed room. They represent ‘generational’ women, i.e., women who live by performing roles imposed upon them by women of earlier generations. Two of the dancers are damned souls coming alive, the third is death and the fourth a child, born unspoilt but forced into the pattern of role playing. The dancer who personifies death wears a black hood, not unlike the one Death wears in The Seventh Seal.