In the atmosphere of Braila in the 1900s, a mysterious woman, together with her mom, is selling her charms.

An ex-convict struggles to survive by brute force alone in a turn-of-the-century slum in Bucharest. Codine is the thug who served 10 years for murdering a friend. He returns home to his miserly mother, whose penny-pinching ways infuriate her son. A young boy looks up to Codine, and through the man's eyes he sees the economic and social injustices from an adult perspective. When Codine kills another man who violated his trust, his mother becomes more unhinged and paranoid. Thinking her son will steal her hoarded money, she plots to kill her only son. The impressionable child watches in horror and amazement at the cruel machinations of the adult work that surrounds him.

Set on the eve of the 1907 peasants' revolt and told from the eyes of an orphaned boy, it is the story of the poverty, hardships, oppression and abuses that ordinary Romanian peasants were subjected to during that period.