After suffering a stroke which paralyzes him and robs him of the power of speech, the industrialist Campemi confined to a wheelchair. His cold, ambitious daughter Valeria assumes temporary responsibility for his affairs, but her real aim is to take complete control of the business, leaving her brothers out of the picture. Their wish, however is to split the patrimony between them. In order to achieve her goal Valeria convinces a notary to draw up a document that will serve as a private deed or testament on which she falsifies her father’s signature. In it, she is named sole custodian of her father’s interests should he be impeded from looking after them himself. The document is then sealed in an envelope. Hinging on this premise, the story unfolds during a weekend at the family’s country house, during which Valeria invites her brothers to be present when the envelope is unsealed before a notary. It is not a story of a battle for power but of moral violence against innocent people in this case, Valeria’s father, who is incapable of reacting to her behaviour and her six-year-old son Alessio. Taciturn and treated with no real affection by his mother the boy and his grandfather are witnesses to all the inequities that take place in the villa, whose occupants fight and despair in a endless paroxysm of bitterness. When the document is read, the disappointment of those present becomes palpable and tem. temperatures rise. Night falls and everyone in the house retires to bed. As always Alessio is alone. He goes to the kitchen and notices that the fame has gone out under the milk placed on the slove for him by his mother; an alarming quantity of gas has filled the room. He goes to his grandfather who is already asleep. Sealing the doorframe with heavy tape, Alessio opens a window, climbs into a bed beside his grandfather’s and waits. Meanwhile the deadly gas penetrates the remaining rooms of the house in which the various occupants are busy plotting their revenge for the following day. Each one with their own score to settle, alone and desperate, planning for a day that for them will never come.