A vanguard movie dealing upon the power of images on our lives. The routine of a small popular cinema in Rome is upset by the irruption of fantastique during a screening. When the spectators are seeing the final duel of the Italian western E per tetto un cielo di stelle, "all of a sudden it's like the mirror breaks", as in an Alice's adventure or an Allen's Purple Rose, and a retired civil servant (Mario Cecchi) is shot dead as the cowboy fires, while the director (Attilio Duse, Solamente Nero) mourns that "he has always yet shown clean films".
Follows a long closed circuit inquiry, the inspector (Brizio Montinaro, Lo Strano Vizio della signora Wardh) restraining on site all the clients and the staff, and this little society stays fixed and analyzed, an intellectual sociologist (Flavio Bucci, L'Ultimo Treno della notte) even being among them. And everyone in these ordinary people seems to have come not only to see the movie and has therefore something to cancel, from the gay man (Enzo Spitaleri, La Bestia uccide a sangue freddo) who meets teenagers in the lavatory, to the duet of drug peddlers who have to talk business (Franco Balducci, Non si sevizia un paperino, and Tony Kendall, Flic ou Voyou), and to the adulterous couple in secret dating (Sergio Dora, L'Iguana dalla lingua di fuoco, and Aurore Clément, Lacombe Lucien).
It appears that the victim, passionate and bulimic cinephile, acting like "a vessel in a medium seance", had prophesied that "today's best films, rather than mirroring the world, seem to infiltrate it". And the reenactment ordered by the deputy chief of police (Luciano Catenacci, Una Vita lunga un giorno), bringing about a second show of the western, can only end with another death, the ticket collector's one (Gabriele Tozzi), urging the confined spectators to order "twelve televisors", one by channel, to kill time in a cacophonous fair. On a program, the western producer (Bruno di Geronimo, writer of Cosa avete fatto a Solange) rejoices that "the morbid curiosity surrounding the cursed film" allows him "to prepare a new cut for first run theaters", offering "a movie that meets the audience's expectations in Hitchcock-style."
Trapped in a never-ending session, spectators have become the real subject of the show, as if cinema has soaked up their life, the frontier between fiction violence and social violence becoming fuzzy. To prove that there is "no magic, witchery or supernatural mystery" and to solve "the agonizing question of the killer identity", the big chief of police (Ettore Manni, A tutte le auto della polizia), called to rescue, is forced to organize a third screening, but things won't go as expected to be. As the sociologist quotes summoning Ray Bradbury and Jules Verne, "there is no reason why the images humanity feeds itself shouldn't do the same with us".
