The Exterminating Angel

After a night at the opera, Edmundo Nóbile and Lucía Nóbile host eighteen wealthy acquaintances at a dinner party inside their expansive mansion. The mood starts with a subtle unease: the family’s servants inexplicably begin to leave just as the guests are about to arrive, and by the time the meal ends, only Julio, the loyal majordomo, remains within the halls. Lucía had planned a playful surprise involving a bear and three sheep, but she calls it off when she learns that guest Sergio Russell dislikes jokes. Yet strange, almost ritual-like patterns begin to surface: guests drift upstairs in a way that feels preordained, Edmundo repeats a toast dedicated to the opera singer, and Cristián Ugalde and Leandro Gomez greet one another three times in increasingly odd permutations—as strangers, cordially, and then with obvious antagonism.

As the party dissolves into a more intimate lounge, the partygoers mingle before settling into the salon to listen to Blanca perform a Paradisi keyboard sonata. When she finishes, Blanca announces she’s tired, and several others speak of going home, yet no one does. Instead, without discussion, the guests and hosts remain, occupying the salon through the night and effectively trapping Lucía from slipping away for a clandestine meeting with Colonel Álvaro Aranda. The sense of enclosure deepens into a peculiar social trap, where manners mask a growing agitation and a sense that time itself has become negotiable within these walls.

Morning reveals a troubling turn: [Sergio Russell] is unconscious, and the house’s rhythm of gentility gives way to a creeping panic. The group ponders why no one tried to leave the night before, and a few attempt to cross the salon threshold only to retreat in distress. When [Julio] returns with leftovers for breakfast, he too finds himself trapped and unable to exit. By evening, the tension has swollen into a survival drama: a shared shortage of clean water, a closet repurposed as a toilet, and voices rising in blame. Raúl points a finger at Eduardo, but Leticia defends Edmundo and the host’s hospitality, as if the social contract of civility could somehow withstand collapse.

Tragedy compounds the predicament: Sergio dies during the night, and the gravity of death compels a harsh decision. Dr. Carlos Conde, along with Álvaro, decides to hide the corpse, an act that marks a turning point in their fragile moral calculus. The outside world gathers—a crowd of onlookers, police, and soldiers—yet no one can enter the mansion, as if an invisible barrier seals the estate from the outside. Inside, the trapped guests siphon water from a pipe in the wall and watch the clock of civilization tick away, their civility fraying as illness spreads and opiates, hoarded by a few, become a dangerous luxury.

In a particularly stark moment, the trio of sheep and the roaming bear materialize within the mansion, a surreal reminder of the boundary between civilization and wild impulse. Eduardo and Beatriz, a young engaged couple, take a tragic step and kill themselves in a closet, a blow that shatters the remaining pretenses of order. As days pass, all of the Nóbiles’ servants return to the mansion, perhaps drawn by the same forces that hold the guests in place. Raúl influences most of the others to believe that their fate will hinge on Edmundo’s death, a thought that accelerates the unraveling of the party’s fragile ethics.

Dr. Conde tries to reason with the increasingly unstable group, and a confrontation erupts, aided by Álvaro and Julio. In a moment of perilous tension, Edmundo emerges from a private space they have begun to inhabit, offering to take his own life. Leticia, perceptive as ever, urges restraint and realizes there is a pattern to the night: the positions of people and furniture align with the moments of the party’s past speech. She has Blanca reprise the ending of the piano sonata, and the group calmly retraces the conversation that followed, as if a chorus could re-script a night that had spiraled beyond their control. This time, when Blanca speaks of exhaustion, the assembly files out of the salon and through the gates, stepping into the outside world and finding a path toward freedom.

Outside, the crowd’s cheers are tempered by a sobering irony: the cathedral becomes a stage for a collective act of thanks, a Te Deum service that feels both celebratory and hollow. Yet the afterglow is short-lived, for the aftermath reveals another cruel twist of fate. Neither the clergy nor the congregants can leave the cathedral, and the military, in a bleak echo of the day’s earlier dread, fires on a group of people waiting in front of the church. Amid the chaos, a flock of sheep reaches the cathedral itself, turning a religious space into a surreal tableau that underscores the film’s relentless meditation on civility, power, and the fragility of social order.

In the end, the night’s puzzling repetitions, the coercive social dynamics, and the collapse of boundaries between host and guest converge into a grim cautionary tale. The mansion becomes a microcosm of a society where luxury and ritual can mask coercion, fear, and complicity, and where the most ordinary acts—sharing a meal, listening to music, stepping into a closet to hide from the world—reverberate with consequences that extend far beyond the walls of the mansion.

Last Updated: October 09, 2025 at 10:52