A man takes up residence with a mysterious marquis and is soon persuaded to enter into an asylum for preventative therapy. Things are not what they seem, and the marquis may be even more sinister than what the young man might have predicted.
Six Prague residents pursue bizarre rituals. Mr. Peony builds a chicken costume to wear while enacting homicidal fantasies toward neighbor Mrs. Loubalova, who does the same dressed as a dominatrix. Their mail carrier, Mrs. Malkova, inhales tiny balls of bread. Newsstand operator Mr. Kula obsessively watches the broadcasts of news anchor Mrs. Beltinska, whose husband regularly scrubs his body.
When a childless couple learn that they cannot have children, it causes great distress. To ease his wife's pain, the man finds a piece of root in the backyard and chops it and varnishes it into the shape of a child. However the woman takes the root as her baby and starts to pretend that it is real.
A very free adaptation of Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus", Goethe's "Faust" and various other treatments of the old legend of the man who sold his soul to the devil. A nondescript man is lured by a strange map into a sinister puppet theatre, where he finds himself immersed in an indescribably weird version of the play, blending live actors, clay animation and giant puppets.
Eugene, an aging man, leads a double life - one real, the other in his dreams. He goes to see a psychoanalyst, who tries to interpret the meaning of his dreams. Eugene finds a way of entering his dream-world at will and finds out about his childhood and what really happened to his parents.