After the death of his wife, Angel, a university professor and writer, he falls into a severe depression. He flees to his house in the country, but there the evil is accentuated, which leads him to an attempted suicide that Teresa, his young neighbor, saves him. Angel starts a relationship with her and her partner, Alberto. Soon he falls in love with Teresa and, through a passionate relationship, he frees himself from his torments. Teresa, Alberto and her theater group on stilts ask her to write a play to represent her in the town. Obsessed by Teresa, she is vivified with this experience with the young, but she soon moves away from him carnally. This rupture desperate and as Teresa disabuses him of any possibility of continuity, in the mind of Angel reappears suicide as the only solution

Los Zancos de Carlos Saura presenta a Fernando Fernan Gómez como un profesor / dramaturgo de mediana edad. Enloquecido de la actriz Laura DelSol, Gómez comienza a obsesionarse con la niña, a pesar de su falta de voluntad para comprometerse. Cuando otro hombre más joven (Francisco Rabal) entra en escena, el drama se oscurece en melodrama. Mientras que el material de la historia en The Stilts puede parecer viejo a primera vista, el cineasta español Carlos Saura invierte a sus personajes con suficiente convicción y humanidad para mantener a los espectadores clavados en sus sillas. Evitando sus narrativas "no lineales" previas (que ignoraron trivialidades como la cronología y la realidad), Saura dirige The Stilts de una manera austera y casi documental.