The faded portrait of a young woman, a wall riddled with gunshots, eerie sounds and moving objects - the ancient villa where painter Leonardo (Franco Nero) has moved in search of a renewed contact with nature is anything but quiet. Almost unwillingly, and despite the fearful objections of his lover (Vanessa Redgrave), he begins to investigate. As the erotic life and untimely death of the countess who lived in the mansion reemerge from the past, Leonardo falls into the spiral of a passion that never existed, slowly allowing reality to take on a hallucinatory intensity. Positioned between two overtly political films (We Still Kill the Old Way and Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion), A Quiet Place in the Country only apparently marks the retreat to a private dimension - the artist's madness is hardly comprehensible outside the alienating socio-economic context in which his art is produced, assigned value, and sold.