Imamura as anthropologist comes to the fore in this epic tale of the primal past subsisting within the modern world. An engineer from Tokyo is sent to a tropical island where he encounters a strange family ostracized for its incestuous practices. Although life on the island seems primitive to the engineer, he also finds it strangely alluring. The film imagines a confrontation between technology and tradition in which technology only appears to win, with the irrational always close at hand as a counterweight to progress.