A formal dinner party starts out normally enough, but after the bourgeois group retire to the host’s music room, they inexplicably find themselves unable to leave.

Viridiana is preparing to start her life as a nun when she is sent, somewhat unwillingly, to visit her aging uncle, Don Jaime. He supports her; but the two have met only once. Jaime thinks Viridiana resembles his dead wife. Viridiana has secretly despised this man all her life and finds her worst fears proven when Jaime grows determined to seduce his pure niece. Viridiana becomes undone as her uncle upends the plans she had made to join the convent.

Librado, an unemployed man, lives in a crowded small house with numerous children and relatives, is beaten for stealing a car antenna. His godmother and her children try to settle in his place. She then is arrested at a supermarket for stealing, however, she offers herself and volunteers a friend of hers for sex to the policemen so she can be released. She is a maid of an employee who acts subservient to his boss, a mid-level government employee at once servile who delivers speeches on sexuality in educational texts and then discusses the matter with his brother, a corrupt inspector.