A company of mink-stoled ladies and tuxedoed gentlemen enter a mansion, regale themselves at supper, and retire to the sitting room. They're still in it a few days later. The door is open, no monsters lurk nearby, but half-crazed voices keep repeating--We can't escape! Before they do, two lovers commit suicide in a closet and everybody alternates between morphine peace and nightmares. The characters choose hell over free exit.

The Exterminating Angel obviously isn't a palace version of Robinson Crusoe's efforts. And as an expose of forced community living, it doesn't go far. The director, Luis Bunuel, rarely shows what--besides distaste--one character feels for another. Adultery seems as interesting a switch as scrambled eggs for breakfast instead of cheerios.

What Bunuel focuses on is the individual's game with despair. A mad-eyed boy grows madder because some woman runs a comb through her hair. A lady sees a hand, mysteriously unconnected to a body, flip-flopping at her. A man gets off his death-bed to lie quietly on top of anybody who isn't his wife. A collection of private, fairly absurd, moments.

But the reason people don't move from the room isn't so absurd. They have been running and suddenly can't take the next step. Bunuel shows how agonizing apathy is. You want desperately to go forward, yet you're in a sort of vaccuum. The longer you remain in it, the more you try to fill it up. You bitch and invent distracting crises. The host, upon urging, offers to shoot himself for inviting everybody over. People begin to thirst and starve so that a piece of fruit, rather than departure, occupies their minds.

But an almost sacrificial slaughter of sheep climaxes their misery. After that, one woman is able to recreate the party up to the lost moment. This time everybody seizes the moment, goes free. Unfortunately, as Bunuel shows, such trails will recur. People go merrily to church--out of which, at the end of services, they make a new cage. Sheep troop in; another cycle of suffering begins.

The beauty of The Exterminating Angel is that it transforms inner struggle into something almost physical. Bunuel speaks through his company, paralyzed in one room, of the human condition. He prevents the movie from disintegrating into the mysterious-accident type by injecting symbols--the sheep, for example. We always know that the absurd situation and the not-quite-tragic characters are part of Bunuel's allegory. JOEL DEMOTT