It is the summer of 1945. A party of young people are enjoying the beginning of a new life to the full. For them this is the year one. One of them, law student Pavel, is more attracted to film than to law. With his eight-millimeter camera, he films everything that catches his attention. One day he captures an interesting face on film, a girl with an air of mystery. Pavel visits the girl, whose name is Helena, and meets hers and her elder energetic sister Olga. From Olga, he learns that the girls have spent the years of German occupation in a concentration camp and cannot forget the horrors they have lived through.

The protagonist (Rudolf Hrusinsky) is a dull, fat, shy government clerk indulging in voyuerism and ego fantasies. In love with another clerk (Kveta Fiolova), he is urged on in his pursuit by a commiserate executive. The story is told in a flashback sequence as the cuckolded Hrusinsky attempts suicide by gassing himself in his bathtub. The "Murder" of the title is not a murder as such, rather the murder that Hrusinsky remembers planning upon discovering his wife's unfaithfulness with his supposed friend and advisor. Both plots failing in his mind, he loses himself in fantastic reveries of his funeral and of hypocritical mourners. ' Deciding (perhaps) that this is not the way out either, he gives up the attempt and imagines a life of reconciliation and eventual affluence.

Engineer Pavel Hnyk is successful at work, but not very happy in his private life. He is approaching his fiftieth birthday and he can't shake the feeling that life is slipping away from him. The most effective medicine for such woes is amorous adventures, and Pavel indulges in them. His wife Alice is a lawyer by profession, so she knows about such cases, and because she is a wise woman, she passes them over in silence. One day, however, a new colleague appears at Pavel's workplace - the charming Slovakian Julie. A friendly relationship soon turns into a love affair, and over time it grows into a headless, destructive passion that cares for nothing and no one...

A story about an everyday life of an inflectional department of Prague hospital.