Nami Matsushima (Meiko Kaji) is locked up and bound in underground solitary confinement, a stark picture of control and deprivation. She manages a quiet, stubborn defiance by fashioning a weapon from a spoon, grinding it against the rough concrete floor with her teeth as a small rebellion against the system that confines her. The prison's chief warden, Goda, Fumio Watanabe, is on the verge of a promotion, a detail that underscores how reward and cruelty mingle within the prison walls.
When an inspector visits, Matsushima is allowed out for a single day. In the tense, spotlighted moment of scrutiny, she launches a shocking, sudden attack on Goda, leaving a jagged scratch across his face and shattering the procedural calm of the facility. The other inmates erupt in riotous anger, but the guards act with practiced efficiency, suppressing the unrest and restoring a fragile order.
The aftermath brings a brutal punishment: the inmates are sent to an intensive labour camp, a harsh measure designed to crush any spark of resistance. To reaffirm dominance and deter any future uprising, Goda orders four guards to publicly threaten and rape Matsushima. The brutality is not just punitive; it’s a calculated spectacle meant to erase the prisoners’ humanity.
Matsushima returns from the labour camp to a van carrying six other prisoners, among them Oba (Kayoko Shiraishi). The ride is a gauntlet of violence—Matsushima is beaten into near lifelessness, and when the guards think she is dead, she awakens with a cold, lethal resolve. She strangles one guard, and Oba and the others overpower another as they blow up the van. Goda sees the wreckage and dispatches search parties to hunt down the fugitives.
The escape leads to an abandoned village, where Oba’s confession lands like a punch to the gut: after discovering her husband’s infidelity, she drowned her two-year-old son and stabbed her unborn baby. In the village, the prisoners encounter a mysterious old woman wielding a dagger; a surreal sequence follows, revealing the prisoners’ accumulated sins as the old woman dies, her body turning into leaves and blowing away with the wind. Before dying, she hands Matsushima a knife, a symbolic tool for the road ahead.
From the village, the group moves to a nearby town to steal clothes and disappear into the night, sheltering in an abandoned hut. One of the prisoners, Haru (Yukie Kagawa), quietly slips away to her own home, where she reunites with her son but also discovers two jailers. They offer to free Haru if she reveals the others’ locations. Distraught, Haru withdraws, but a guard shadows her while another returns to Goda. Matsushima intervenes, killing the pursuing guard, and in the skirmish, a fellow prisoner is accidentally shot and dies.
A sightseeing tour comes through the area, and violence erupts again as three aggressively predatory men from the group rape another prisoner and are left to die. The other prisoners give chase, hijacking the bus, torturing, stripping, and binding the men, while terrorizing the other passengers. The scene tightens the film’s themes of vengeance and the cost of society’s cruelty.
In another surreal moment, the prisoners are ostracized by society, a cinematic echo of their earlier torment, and their retaliation against a world that deem them less than human grows more pronounced. As the bus nears a checkpoint, Oba uses Matsushima as a decoy; Matsushima is captured, but Goda’s men set up a roadblock—an enormous truck carrying Haru’s young son—aimed at forcing the bus to stop. Haru rushes toward her child, but is shot by sniper guards. Oba commands the prisoners to kill the hostages, killing the bus driver and seizing the bus’s control to bypass the roadblock.
By night, the bus is cornered by the police. Goda orders Matsushima to learn the truth about the hostages, and she lies, claiming they have been killed, prompting a police charge. The prisoners throw the three men out, and they are felled by police bullets. In the ensuing struggle, all the prisoners but Oba die; Oba survives a subsequent injury and is set to return to prison in the same vehicle as Matsushima. Goda orders the guards to finish Matsushima off, but Oba intervenes by biting a guard, buying Matsushima time to escape. In the junkyard, Oba dies, and Matsushima finally breaks free.
Goda is promoted, stepping into a city job that symbolizes the system’s capacity to normalize cruelty. Matsushima tracks him down and ends his run with a series of stabbing blows, a personal and brutal reckoning that feels both earned and devastating. The film closes on a haunting, dreamlike tableau: all the female prisoners, dressed in their striped uniforms, run free through the city as they pass a shared dagger among themselves, a collective symbol of what they have endured and what they dare to reclaim.
