Death Laid an Egg 1968

Anna Gina Lollobrigida and Marco Jean-Louis Trintignant run a hi-tech, automated poultry farm that touts a radical future for farming, including the unsettling idea of breeding boneless chickens under precise control. To the outside world, their partnership looks like a modern, efficient marriage built on shared work and ambition, but beneath the surface lies a stark, hidden truth about Marco. He leads a double life as a serial killer, luring prostitutes to motel rooms and stabbing them, a sequence of acts he keeps carefully concealed from his wife.

The arrival of Anna’s cousin Gabri Ewa Aulin shakes the already fragile balance in the household. Gabri’s presence intensifies the strain between the couple, and soon she and Marco begin an affair, sparking dreams of leaving everything behind to start anew together. Yet this affair masks a deeper plot: Gabri is secretly scheming with her husband Mondaini Jean Sobieski to murder Anna and frame Marco for the crime, having uncovered Marco’s troubling secret and seeking to sever the ties that bind them all.

When Marco finally discovers Anna’s body in a hotel room, he acts with cold efficiency, cleaning the scene and transporting the corpse back to the farm to dispose of it. What Gabri and Mondaini fail to realize is that Marco’s obsession isn’t a simple hunger for killing prostitutes; it’s a perverse fixation on orchestrating role-play murders—payments are exchanged, boundaries are tested, and the “game” ends with everyone walking away, supposedly unscathed.

Back at the farm, tragedy intensifies as Marco’s attempt to hide the body goes catastrophically wrong: he slips into a grinding machine used for chicken feed, a grim accident that leaves a chilling mark on the investigation to come. The police, who first respond to the supposed murder at the hotel and then follow the threads of Marco’s rumored activities to the farm, begin to piece together a far more complex picture than they initially imagined. Their attention lands squarely on Gabri, suspected of killing Anna out of a bitter sense of kinship and jealousy, even as the truth about Marco’s real “work” starts to emerge.

As the net tightens, Gabri and Mondaini are eventually arrested for Anna’s murder, their desperate scheme unraveling under the weight of evidence and motive. The farm becomes the final stage for the consequences of all the tangled choices, as the chickens feed on the foregone remains of Marco’s crime, and the illusion of an orderly, utopian enterprise is stripped away to reveal the brutal reality at its core.

In the end, the story intertwines power, desire, and deception, painting a portrait of a marriage strained by ambition and secret lives. The hi-tech dream that began as a symbol of efficiency and control becomes the backdrop for a series of betrayals and a tragedy that forces every character to confront the true cost of their actions.