This is an adaptation of film director Horst Blenek's own novel Die Zelle, which is based on the experiences he suffered as a political prisoner in East Germany and in Russia in the '50s. Filmed in black and white, the dark filming emulates the oppression experienced by the prisoner. In the story, the writer is a prisoner who has not yet been "broken." That is, he has not yet succumbed to the skillfully applied tortures and signed a written confession of his so-called crimes. He is supposed to have planned a bombing incident. He endures an escalating number of indignities, until a fellow prisoner tells him what happens at the next level of torture, in which he would be sent to a "psychiatric" hospital.