A rehearsal is disrupted when six figures mysteriously appear on the stage, claiming to be fictional characters from an unfinished play searching for an author to tell their tragic story. An adaptation of the classic Luigi Pirandello play, updated to take place in a 1970s television studio.

In present-day U.S., Dr. Michael Parker, a prominent surgeon, unexpectedly runs into his German-born wife whom he thought was dead. Victor, an artist and his "dead" wife's now boyfriend, berates Dr. Parker for "killing" her. The bulk of the story flashes back to Austria during World War II as we learn how Dr. Parker met and married his wife, and the one mistake that may have cost him his family.

Mathias Pascal, only son of a once rich family, marries beautiful Romalinda, who has a terrible mother-in-law. She controls her daughter, and soon his home life becomes a nightmare, as well as his job as assistant librarian in his home town. His only moments of lights are his mother and his baby, but both die on the same day. Shocked he leaves his hometown and gets to Monte Carlo, where he wins a fortune at the Casino. Returning home, he reads his own obituary in a paper. They have found a corpse in a creek and connected it with his disappearance. Mathias, noticing that he now is free from all ties to his old live, decides to start a new one, and goes to Rome, where he rents a room in a pension full of fake spiritualists who are controlling the owner. The chief of the gang, Terence, wants to marry the owner's daughter Adrienne, and has convinced her father to give her to him, with no regards of Adrienne's feelings, who is in love with and loved by Mathias. When Terence steals Mathias 50,000 Lira, and Mathias, being officially dead can neither marry Adrienne nor denounce Terence to the police, he decides to do something about his state and travels home, just to notice that Romalinda has remarried...

儿子Giuseppe逝去，他的女友Jeanne突然登门造访，独自住在西西里的房子里的母亲Anna（朱丽叶·比诺什 饰）却不知如何开口告知她死讯。两个女人一同等待着Giuseppe的到来，她们的等待变成了对爱和意志的行动，也是她们信念的行为表达。