Daniel Feeld is a successful screenwriter whose world is coming to pieces. He is suffering agonizing pain in his nether regions on two counts: (1) a physical illness in his bowels that his doctors repeatedly misdiagnose, and (2) an insufferable director who, in an obsessional effort to place the actress who is also his mistress at the centre of every shot, is bent on wrecking Feeld's latest drama, called Karaoke.
 Through a haze of pain dulled first by alcohol and then by morphine, Daniel begins to notice people all around him seem to be repeating scraps of dialogue from his play. Is his script a psychic forecast of reality, or has he himself only been lip-synching to some prewritten karaoke script? When he discovers he has accidentally named his repulsive little villain after an actual (and dangerous) person, he must reconsider the relationship between his real and fictional worlds.