In 1958, a disheveled, pregnant young woman named Margita Karadzic staggers into a public toilet, once a bathhouse, and gives birth in one of the stalls. Tragedy strikes as she flushes the baby—the result of rape—down the toilet, setting off a haunting chain of events that will echo through decades. The film then jumps forward to reveal that, exactly twenty-two years later, a punk couple in the same bathhouse are found murdered and dismembered. Their remains are flushed away in the same methodical cycle, and the crime scene is left tidily cleaned, as if to erase evidence of a vicious act that continues to unfold in the shadows of the building.
Nineteen years after that grim night, Teodora, Vaki (her boyfriend), and their friends Tina and Sale regroup to revisit the bathhouse. They go there with a desperate purpose: to procure drugs from the pair of dealers Cane and Sleš. The place feels haunted, its corridors echoing with sounds that resemble an infant’s cries and laughter leaking through the plumbing. The building’s only other occupants are an unnamed attendant, a wino, and a gay Magistar Đorđević, a frightening figure whose presence adds a chilling undertone to the already tense atmosphere. The scene is vividly tense as the four friends move through the dimly lit rooms, trying to stay one step ahead of danger.
As Vaki and Sale negotiate with Cane, a violence erupts: Sleš and Tina are murdered, Tina meeting her end in front of a hidden Teodora. Panic spreads as the group scrambles to escape, but every exit in the bathhouse seems sealed. Cane, acting impulsively, shoots a drunk man who is caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the group discovers that this man was not the killer after all when Sale finds a dropped camcorder. The device briefly captured the real killer at the moment of the crime, a killer whose boots resemble those of Magistar Đorđević, casting doubt on the obvious culprit and deepening the mystery.
The discovery leads the survivors to a disturbing realization: the attendant’s body—initially found in a back room—vanishes, and a tunnel to the sewers is revealed in her living quarters. The tension escalates as Vaki and Djordjević are murdered by the unseen killer, who is eventually revealed to be the attendant herself, a shocking twist that also explains why the bathhouse has felt so unnaturally alive for so long. The killer is Margita, the same woman who began this grim saga decades earlier, and she has spent years pursuing a singular purpose: feeding her offspring, nicknamed Cloaca, by flushing the bodies of those who come into the bathhouse. Margita is aided by a deranged former professor, Hadži-Tošić, and Cane, who was abducted as a toddler and raised as Margita’s son in a dark, twisted partnership.
As the trio of captives—Teodora, the pregnant Teodora, and Sale—face an imminent, brutal fate, the family’s fragile bonds begin to crumble from inside. Margita slashes Hadži-Tošić’s throat after Cane is injured by one of his own traps and, crucially, because Hadži-Tošić appears drawn to Teodora. The act of betrayal triggers Teodora’s desperate bid for freedom: she breaks free, seizes a weapon, and stabs Margita, turning the tide just long enough for Teodora and Sale to flee. They make their way toward the sewers, pursued by Cane, who is desperate to recover the captives and return them to their fates.
In the claustrophobic sewers, Teodora manages to shove Cane into a pit, and the myth of Cloaca appears to claim him as part of its ominous appetite—the pit seems to swallow him, and the audience is left with a chilling sense of a creature or force living beneath the city. The surface moment arrives with a fraught reunion: Teodora and Sale, battered but alive, come face to face with the wounded Margita. A passing vagrant intervenes, sacrificing himself to end Margita’s life, and in her final breath, Margita reveals one last, devastating truth: Teodora is pregnant.
The film closes on a haunting note, as Teodora gives birth to a child whose physiology appears to align with the same mysterious disorder associated with Cloaca, the “T.T. Syndrome.” The ending emphasizes cycles of violence and the terrifying possibility that some sins of the past persist, haunting new generations in a world where the walls of a bathhouse and the sewer system beneath it seem to breathe with long-held secrets.
