One of Buñuel's most brilliant and savage assaults on bourgeois mores, The Exterminating Angel takes place in a lavish mansion, where the well-appointed guests arrive to attend a posh dinner party. After a pleasant evening spent whispering behind each other's backs, ruthlessly judging each other and plotting infidelities, the guests attempt to depart, but find that they are unable to leave the living room — despite the fact that the doorway is completely open and nothing bars their exit. A night stretches into days, then weeks and months, and the captives turn against each other as they are forced to live in their own filth, break open pipes in the wall for drinking water and contend with roaming sheep and a bear that have found their way into the house. Playing out his madly surreal scenario with marvelously unassuming logic, Buñuel delightedly strips away his characters' thin veneer of "civilized" propriety as they are reduced to a barbarically absurd existence that is nasty, brutish and unendurably long.