The Saragossa Manuscript

During a Napoleonic Wars battle in the Aragonese town of Saragossa, an officer retreats to the second floor of an inn. He discovers a large book adorned with drawings of two men hanging on a gallows and two women in a bed. An enemy officer tries to arrest him but ends up translating the book, and he realizes the author is his own grandfather, a captain in the Walloon Guard.

In a flashback, Alfonso is invited to dine with two Moorish princesses, Emina and Zibelda, in a secret inner room of Venta Quemada. They reveal they are his cousins and that he must marry them both to provide heirs, but only if he converts to Islam. They seduce him and give him a skull goblet to drink from, sealing a perilous bargain with him.

Alfonso wakes in a desolate countryside beside a heap of skulls under a gallows. He meets a hermit priest who is tending a possessed man; the latter recounts a story about two sisters and forbidden love. The surreal awakening foreshadows the intertwining paths of fate and illusion.

Alfonso sleeps in the hermitage chapel and hears strange voices at night. The voices echo the earlier tales and deepen the sense that reality and story are blurred. The chapel becomes a liminal space between dream and memory.

Riding away, Alfonso is captured by the Spanish Inquisition. He is rescued by the two princesses and aided by the Zoto brothers, who seem to have returned from the dead. Back in the inner room, the princesses become amorous, but Sheikh Gomelez interrupts and forces him to drink again from the skull goblet.

Alfonso awakens once more at the gallows, this time with a cabalist lying beside him. They set off toward the cabalist's castle, leaving the dreamlike sequence wobbling between reality and myth. The journey hints at a larger game controlling the events.

On the road to the cabalist's castle, the pair is joined by a skeptical mathematician who quips that 'the human mind is ready to accept anything, if it is used knowingly.' The remark frames the film's approach to perception and interpretation. The mathematician's presence signals a meta-commentary on the unfolding tales.

Part 2 shifts to the frame story told by the leader of a band of gypsies who visit the castle. The frame tale introduces a 'tale-within-a-tale' structure that invites the audience to see connections between stories. The gypsy storyteller sets up a labyrinth of nested narratives that demand careful attention.

The inner tales begin to intertwine, with some characters appearing before they are formally introduced. Later tellings shed new light on earlier events recounted by other characters, reshaping the audience's understanding. The complex weave underscores the film's theme of ambiguity and interpretation.

Alfonso is told to return to Venta Quemada, where he meets the two princesses again. The Sheikh entrusts him with the large book so he can write the end of his own story. This places the frame narrative on the path to its conclusion.

Alfonso wakes under the gallows once more, with his two servants nearby as if the journey were about to restart. Back at the Saragossa inn, he begins writing in the large book, then a messenger says the princesses are waiting. He tosses the book aside as it lands on the table where the whole tale began.

The Sheikh explains that the entire adventure was a deliberate game designed to test Alfonso's character. The revelation reframes the events as a moral trial rather than a straightforward plot. The film closes on the idea that perception and choice define reality.