After receiving a telegram from their cousin informing them of the sender's own death, Masuo and Ritsuko travel to his house to verify the news. The trip brings back memories of Matsuo's traditional and patriarchal family, and its history of arranged and often incestuous marriages. Having given up his dream of becoming a baseball player in order to meet his families expectations, Masuo's growing feels for Ritsuko make him realise he may never be able to escape their clutches.

One of the greatest and most subversive films by Nagisa Ōshima, The Ceremony is a scathing attack on postwar Japanese society via a portrait of one family, whose increasingly desperate attempts to maintain an outward veneer of respectability mask a pathological history of incest, xenophobic nationalism, failure, and humiliation.