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A very handsome man finds the love of his life, but he suffers an accident and needs to have his face rebuilt by surgery after it is severely disfigured.

A once handsome playboy, César finds himself in a mental facility and he can't remember why. All he can remember is meeting the love of his life for one day, and then getting into a car accident which left his face horribly disfigured. But the pain of becoming physically undesirable may help him to find the truth.—Mark Barrancos

A handsome young man wakes up to a female voice telling him to open his eyes. He drives to an empty city. He wakes again, this time to a woman (Nuria) in his bed. He (Cesar) tells her not to leave him messages on his alarm clock.

From a prison cell in Madrid, the 25-year-old man, César (Eduardo Noriega) (a confident and wealthy young man who has money and is successful with women), tells his story to psychiatrist Antonio (Chete Lera) while wearing a prosthetic mask. Cesar's parents died 15 years ago, and he is rich. Yet, he doesn't get a lawyer to defend himself. He says his partners have been stealing from him and when he was broke, they abandoned him.

Flashbacks reveal the following events: Good-looking César is attractive to women. At his birthday party, he flirts with Sofía (Penelope Cruz), his best friend Pelayo's (Fele Martinez) (whose personality is marked by his inferiority complex when it comes to meeting women) date. Nuria has come to the party, even though Cesar has not invited her. Nuria wants to have sex with Cesar, but he sends her away as he has a reputation of not being seen with the same woman twice. Cesar spends most of the party chatting up Sofia, angering Pelayo in the process. Pelayo leaves without Sofia. Later, Cesar takes Sofia home and stays the night, but they do not sleep together.

The next morning, César's obsessive ex-lover Nuria (Najwa Nimri) pulls up outside Sofía's flat, offering him a ride and sex. On the way to her house, however, she crashes the car with the intent to kill them both. César survives the crash but is horribly disfigured, beyond the help of cosmetic surgery (he has 3 surgeries already, but with little cosmetic impact), so he decides to wear a mask to conceal his face. Sofía cannot bear to see him and tries to keep her distance. Sofia goes back to Pelayo, and even Pelayo is cold towards Cesar.

After César's disfigurement, he begins to have a series of disorienting experiences. One night, returning from a bar drunk (alone after being shunned by both Sofia and Pelayo), César falls asleep in the street. On awakening, everything has changed: Sofía now claims to love him and the surgeons (who had shunned him so far, suddenly call him in and talk about a revolutionary new surgical technique to restore his looks) restore his lost looks. Cesar feels that its too good to be true. Even Pelayo accepts Sofia and Cesar being together.

But as he makes love to Sofía one night, she suddenly changes into Nuria. Horrified, César smothers her to death with a pillow. Yet everyone else believes Nuria was indeed the woman everyone else calls Sofía (Plus Cesar cannot give any evidence that the woman that he calls Sofia, actually exists. Even Pelayo insists that the woman that Cesar calls Nuria is actually Sofia. and that Nuria is dead.), and he is imprisoned for her murder.

While he is confined to the prison, fragments of his past return to him as if in a dream (he is hypnotized by the prison doctor to recall specific events of the past which occur to him in a dream). Caser watches prison TV and sees the ad of a company (Life Extension) and remembers that he had seen the same advertisement before. he searches for the company on the Internet. The company has an office in Madrid and Caser makes the prison doctor take him there.

It is revealed that, shortly after falling asleep drunk on the street, César signed a contract with Life Extension, a company specializing in cryonics, to be Cryogenically preserved and to experience extremely lucid and lifelike virtual reality dreams. The procedure costs $240K. $30K for the freezing and the rest in an investment account that pays for maintenance. Returning to their headquarters, under supervision by prison officers, he discovers they specialize in cryonics with a twist: "artificial perception" or the provision of a fantasy based on the past to clients who are reborn in the future.

Cesar is sure that he is living in his dream. He starts running and yelling that he wants to wake up. But the prison guard accompanying him shoots at him, hitting the prison doctor instead. Duvernois (Gérard Barray), the L.E. representative who then appears and explains that Cesar committed suicide at home shortly after signing the contract and was placed in Cryonic suspension. He reveals that the era is 150 years in the future and César's time from his awakening in the street onward has been a dream, spliced retroactively into his actual life and replacing his true memories. The dream world is controlled by Cesar and the hell he created was for himself. He just needs to think, and he will have a beautiful life again, with any girl he desires. He controls his dreams by just thinking about them.

At the end of the film, César decides to wake and be resurrected by committing suicide (Duvernois says jumping from the building is the way to end the dream). Convinced his life since the drunken night in the street has been a nightmarish vision created by Life Extension, he leaps from the roof of the company's high-rise headquarters, and the film ends, apparently ambiguously, on a black screen with a woman telling him to open his eyes.