Alea's black comedy resembles his own Last Supper and Buñuel's Exterminating Angel in its closed-in, darkly satiric portrait of an entire class in the midst of a profound crisis--its impending elimination! The parable observes a bourgeois family in Cuba who decide, in the aftermath of the Revolution, to cut themselves off completely from the “contamination” of outside events. Hoarding money and supplies, they close off their villa (with the servants still inside), and maintain a surface of upper-class stability. But, just as the history of humanity has passed through different forms of human relations as the productive forces have developed, this family follows a reverse path as its productive forces decrease: from capitalism, to feudalism, slavery, primitive communism, and finally to barbarism. It is a tribute to Alea's command of the medium that, although this direction is clear from the start, the film remains suspenseful and full of surprises.