Laura is a depressed and introverted young woman who lives alone in a small apartment and works as a nurse. Her quiet existence is shadowed by an abusive relationship with Antoine, who is distant and often leaves after they have sex. After their encounter, Laura tends to Antoine when he injures his foot, revealing her profession through the care she provides. The moment is punctuated by her distracted fascination with a patient’s clay carving and a private act of masturbation, during which a red spot appears on her groin.
As the night unfolds, a disturbing sequence of physical changes begins. A shower reveals a new purple stain on her back after one of her nails falls off, and she starts preparing for a party as her friends arrive. Her meticulous cleaning ritual becomes a source of mockery when her friends soil the floor, and Laura endures their jibes as they tease her compulsive habits. Among the chatter, Julian appears, a friend who seems to be sexually interested in Laura, a tension that threads through the social visit.
Later, Antoine forces Laura into aggressive sex, deepening the power imbalance in their relationship. That night, she falls ill and vomits on him. A cascade of small, unsettling incidents follows: she staggers into the bathroom, breaks a glass, and a broken shard-littered floor accompanies her increasing fragility. She wakes naked with Antoine absent, drinks from the sink, and discovers the drain is clogged with her own blood. Tripping on glass, she slips and slams her head against the floor, then dreams of a rotting carcass in an advanced state of decomposition. A pool of blood forms near the wound on her head as she bandages herself and takes medication, later receiving a visit from Julian who notices the bruises across her naked body. She moments of intimacy with him, then sinks back into sleep for the day.
Mornings bring new symptoms: Laura wakes weak, defecates while standing, then faints again. A dream places her inside a clandestine laboratory where a doctor is cutting off her hand to feed Antoine and Julian, both naked in a cage. The waking world grows more frail as her skin darkens and she struggles to clean open wounds with showers that do little to help. In a grim self-repair moment, she sutures a rotten wound on her hand and applies a bandage just as more nails fall away. Realizing the scope of her decline, she covers all windows and mirrors with black sheets to shut out the outside world.
Descent becomes fixation: Laura begins to collect parts of her body that are peeling away—fingertips, tufts of hair, and bits of flesh—placing them into jars and photographing their evolution. She uses these pieces to fashion bloody sculptures, a process that intertwines with memories of Antoine. In a chilling moment, she masturbates while recalling Antoine’s visit, then recalls his attempt to help her wash up, a memory that ends with him being killed by her, struck down with multiple hammer blows to the head. The apartment’s walls darken with black blood and flesh, and maggots gather where her wounds once were as she stares into a mirror and removes maggots from her chest with tweezers, seemingly without pain.
The next day, she develops the photographs and orders more jars for her growing collection. She contacts Julian to visit, and when he arrives, he encounters her rotting body on a mattress, begging him to have sex with her. Julian refuses, and Laura enacts a brutal murder, stabbing him to death. Her condition worsens: her skin turns black, maggots swarm around her exposed flesh, and a psychedelic dream of being buried alive haunts her. In a final act of artistry, she assembles one last sculpture from Julian and her own remains, ripping away more skin to complete the piece. She gazes into the mirror one final time, then deliberately blinds herself by stabbing her milky eyes.
Dragging herself toward the rotting corpses of Antoine and Julian, Laura’s body reaches the ultimate decomposition. A rancid thrill of rot overtakes her, and a final, horrific wail escapes as her jaw detaches from her skull, leaving a lifeless skeleton slumped on the floor.
