His film takes place in the late 1950s, in a cold and lifeless autumn or early spring, in a mental hospital of whitewashed walls and barren interiors. The patients wander the grounds, sometimes try to run away, line up for their pills, are angry or morose, mill about aimlessly at a dance, attend religious services and stand stock still as if lost in thought. Their actions are watched by Tregenza on the Cinemascope screen, the widest gauge available. The film covers an enormous expense of screen, and is often photographed in long shots, so that the characters seem isolated within vast empty spaces. One point of the wide screen may be to emphasize how little contact these people have with one another.
Dialogue is heard only in snatches.
There are no word-driven relationships. Visuals make the point. Some of the scenes have the same kind of deadpan visual punning we find, in another tone, in the films of Jacques Tati. It is a hunt. In a barren, low-ceilinged room, too big for the people in it, volunteers arrange clusters of balloons.