The cast and crew of an international co-production find themselves stranded at a seaside Spanish resort awaiting the arrival of their director and their salaries. They while away the time drinking at the hotel bar and engaging in various couplings and uncouplings. These souls in Purgatory treat each other with the kind of cruelty one might expect from a Fassbinder film, and things only worsen with the arrival of the filmmaker, a tyrannical wunderkind. Although the violence here is not as visceral as in other films in this series, Fassbinder seems to be arguing that sometimes the soul can be killed while the body still lives.