A film crew and a group of actors arrive in Venice and begin making a period film based on John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi. They find lodgings in the decadent Hungaria hotel, a strange place where bizarre incidents happen in the dark world beneath it: the hotel staff are able to provide things the guests can barely imagine in their wildest dreams. Director Stoken meets with an inexplicable accident, and while in a coma he experiences a frenzied vision in which the real world mingles with entirely irrational events. What is dream and what is reality? Which hotel guest will find himself in the clutches of a dark power? Producer Jonathan realises that an opportunity has presented itself but under his direction real life is increasingly substituted for the artificial film world. The finale is approaching. . . .