Plot
New York businessman Mark Lester is diagnosed with a hypertrophy of the prostate requiring surgery in two weeks according to his doctor, who hands him a syringe and medication against the pain. Mark does not to tell his wife, deciding to use the time to return to Santo Domingo, where 12 years ago he met Maira, the woman of his life.
At the island airport, Mark meets his old friend Jacques who has reserved a room for him at the Sheraton. Jacques tells Mark that Maira really loved him and would have followed him but was too poor to do so. When Maira disappeared, her father, an old voodoo magician, left his house to stay at Boca de Yuma, a wild place at the other side of the island, together with his little daughter.
While Mark is dreaming of his upcoming surgery in his room, a hotel maid masturbates, looking at his exposed penis. When he wakes up, he has sex with her. In a call home, he learns his wife is drunk. Later, walking the streets, he sees Maira's reflection in a shopping window, looking at him. She appears unchanged by time.
At Jacques', Mark meets Lucia, whom Jacques rescued from prostitution when she was 15. Lucia had the idea of founding a school, but they need funding. In Jacques' absence, Mark says he is nauseated by their kindness, talks about perhaps providing the funding himself, and asks Lucia to do as she did with 15. Disgusted, she performs oral sex on him "for Jacques". Later, Mark is in genital pain, and Jacques accompanies him to the hotel, where Mark injects himself with the painkiller. Jacques tells him to stay away from himself and Lucia.
In the streets, Mark spots Maira again. She addresses him, saying it was his return that makes her appearance possible. When Mark is forced to grope his groin in pain, she vanishes. At night, Mark meets his friend Voyakis, now owner of a successful nightclub. Mark tells him about once seeing a voodoo magician performing a strange rite after a car accident: He collected the soul in a bottle, and people said that if he opened it again, the soul would return again. Watching the gay dancer and his female partner dance to the music of "Sexy Night", Mark hallucinates her being Maira and experiences another fit of genital pain.
The next day, he goes to Boca di Yuma and meets Maira's father at the beach. He tells him that he collected her last breath in the bottle. She carried his name on her lips, cursing him. He also tells him he will never leave and that his illness will become stronger until he dies. She will not let him leave, and he will stay forever. When Mark asks him whether she is alive, he tells him she died long ago, but that for him she is alive until he too will live. In his glass bottle, he keeps her soul so that no evil spirit can disturb her eternal sleep.
When Mark's wife Liza arrives, he is asleep. She undresses, and wakes him up. She wants him to return with her for surgery. They talk about her sterility and his impending castration. When she mentions that she bought him with her money, Mark slaps her so she is flung onto the bed, which causes his erection and he penetrates her from behind.
Later, Mark receives a message from Maira and goes off to meet her on the beach where he remembers having sex with her back then. He meets her there and can feel the warmth of her skin, proving to himself it is not just a mad dream. He still desires her more than anything. She, however, is reproachful of his arrogant and destructive possessiveness and accuses him of having broken his promises and leaving her. She drugs him with a rare herb called "Mexican mushroom", then performs oral sex on an approaching black local while he is watching, immobilized by the drug.
Liza, realising Mark has left her without even a message, books a flight back for the next day. At the airport, a man tells her that her husband will die if she leaves. In the meantime, Mark hides in a dark hotel room getting drunk and sees Maira and the overweight hotel owner having sex with two black men. Liza, after having looked for Mark in vain, visits Jacques, who locates him for her with a brief phone call. In return, he wants to get back what was taken from him, having sex with Liza while Lucia is watching, pleasuring herself. Mark, after injecting a high dose of painkiller, hallucinates about his surgery and about having sex with Lucia on the beach. He runs a temperature, and Maira comes to visit him in his room, wanting to take care of him, but leaving him again. In a fit of madness, Mark stabs the owner, accusing her of having defiled Maira. Jacques and Liza see Maira leaving the brothel and enter to find the body, and a man tells them that "Maira" is not the Maira of old, but her 10-year younger sister who the father has brought up magically in Maira's memory and physical likeness, to avenge her death, knowing that Mark would eventually come back.
Mark meets "Maira" on the beach. While they are having sex, she reveals that she is not who he thinks she is, and that he needs to die to avenge Maira's death. Mark walks away towards the sea, kneels down, and cuts off his own penis with a knife, his blood spurting and mixing with the foam. He dies. "Maira" sits down next to him and caresses him.
When Jacques and Lisa find his body there, Jacques says, "That was what Mark wanted. He only wanted to kill himself."
