Three escaped convicts rob a gun store and come upon a remote house in which a family of four live with their maid. But the criminals are not prepared for the sexual appetite of the inhabitants.

Bob is an unassuming office worker and train enthusiast who leads a double life as a schizophrenic and misogynist killer. He teeters on the edge of reality. Television news reports encourage him in ways no one realizes.

At a summer-evening dance a young girl meets a man who tells her he is a doctor. They go off together, and after that she never sees him again. She learns that she is pregnant and inquires about him at various hospitals, with no success. She reads of his engagement and becomes acquainted with another girl with a situation like her own.

A Swedish cargo ship is in the winter of 1938 at the dock in Gdynia in Poland, waiting to depart with coal to Sweden. In a tavern in the port a Polish dockworkers tries to tell something to the Swedish sailors, but is rudely turned away by the tavern owner. Later in the evening the port worker is found dead. That same evening one of the Swedish sailors, meets a Jewish woman who has fled Nazi Germany.