Plot summary

The dark and melancholy story of a former teenage Nazi concentration camp inmate, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), and the S.S. officer who was her torturer and lover, Max (Sir Dirk Bogarde), who accidentally meet again in a Vienna hotel in 1957, where Max works as the night porter. They resume their sadomasochistic relationship, although Max's former S.S. comrades have something different in mind for them. The story unfolds like a gruesome dance of death.—Tim Kallinis