THE EXQUISITE CADAVER

A girl is seen slowly and deliberately laying her head down on railroad tracks as an oncoming train approaches. Two years later, Carlos, a well-to-do family man and publisher of pulp horror novels receives an anonymous yellow package containing a severed human hand. He buries it in a nearby park. The next yellow package he receives is left unopened on a bench in the city. However, when he arrives home the package is awaiting him. This one contains a torn-up dress and a photograph of a girl. His beautiful wife reads him a telegram asking if he would like a forearm. He feebly attempts to lie about the contents with a work-related explanation to his wife. Now suspicious, Carlos's wife follows her husband and spots a mysterious woman in black following him as well.

Without a word, Carlos enters the mysterious woman's car. She drives him to her remote home, where she feeds him lysergic acid embedded in red blotting paper. Suddenly he is ambling down a long corridor drawn towards a woman's voice lamenting her lost love. He reaches the end of the hallway to discover the voice emanating from a tape recorder. He finds a woman's body in a refrigerator curled up, pale, but immaculate. When he awakens from the drugged stupor the editor is back at home, his body covered in a jaundiced yellow. His wife explains to him that she received a call from Parker, the mysterious woman, and she went to her house to fetch him. The wife believes neither the explanation given by her husband nor the one she receives from Parker about what has happened.

Trying to come clean with his wife, the editor tells her how two years ago he met the young woman of the refrigerator. Her name was Esther. In a flashback Esther is seen in a coffee shop fiddling with some pills. She appears bored, yet eager to flirt with the older publisher. Shortly afterwards they became lovers. Then Carlos and Esther, now a couple, are seen out near the sea. As she edges toward the cliff, she says, "I'd die so that my love for you will last. So that indifference will not kill it".

Calmly the editor's wife confesses that she knew some of it all along. She had hired a detective to spy on her husband. In fact it was the detective who saved Esther when she put her head on the train track. Through the collective memories of the publisher, his wife, and Parker, the corrosion of the romance is recounted.

Sick and heartbroken after she was rebuffed by the editor, Esther fell under the spell of a scheming doctor claiming to cure leukemia. While still under his influence Esther met Parker in a hotel in Paris. In love with her, Parker rescued Esther from the false healer. However, Esther never fully recovered from her ill-fated affair with the editor. After some suicide attempts one day Parker found Esther dead with an empty bottle in her hand. Parker now planned to avenge her deceased lover. She started to send the macabre yellow packages. The last of which contains Esther's severed head. The editor then called the police, but when they arrive to Parker's house to investigate she has left with her driver heading back to Paris. Seduced by Parker, the editor's wife goes inside Parker's car and leaves with her.

The sender of the packages is revealed to be Parker, who was in love with Esther, the girl from Carlos's past. Parker orchestrated the delivery of severed body parts to Carlos as revenge, with the final package containing Esther's severed head.

The ending reveals that the cycle of guilt, betrayal, and grief can persist long after a relationship ends, with vengeance becoming a means of coping for the bereaved. Carlos's infidelity and emotional distance set off a tragic chain of events, while Parker’s actions expose the destructive power of obsession and unresolved trauma. The final package serves as both a grisly punishment and a chilling closure, tying together the film’s themes of love, loss, and retribution.