In a post-apocalyptic, surreally dilapidated France, food is scarce and grain is used as currency. The narrative centers around a disheveled apartment building run by a butcher, who maintains a grimly efficient business from the ground floor. His building is an eccentric mélange of desperate tenants including a toy maker, a bed-ridden man who lives in waterlogged rooms, and a pair of brothers who make mooing boxes for an unspecified purpose. The denizens of this tenement live a bleak existence, engaging in peculiar activities to distract from the harsh realities of their world, which is characterized by a perpetual air of mistrust and anxiety over the lack of food.

The plot thickens with the arrival of a new tenant, a former circus clown, who quickly becomes the focus of attention for the butcher's bespectacled daughter. As the pair form a tentative bond, the building's bizarre residents start to notice a pattern in the butcher's source for meat, which coincides with the disappearance of prior tenants. A subterranean group known as the Troglodytes, who avoid consuming any animal products, are also entwined with the goings-on above. What unfolds is a darkly comedic and grotesque struggle for survival, where alliances are formed, and conspiracies are hatched, all under the shadow of the butcher's sinister machinations.