At their 25th high-school anniversary some bourgeois citizens remember their time in school as a happy one. In reality it was quite the contrary. The school was a madhouse in which the teachers, especially Blomme, tormented the students. As a result one of them became a murderer.

Set in the neurosurgical ward of Copenhagen's Rigshospitalet, the city and country's main hospital, nicknamed "Riget", "Riget" means "the realm" or "the kingdom" and leads one to think of "dødsriget", the realm of the dead.