The film begins with a breakfast meeting attended by the eight conspirators. Normally, this would be followed by the scene in which the crime is planned, but that scene does not occur until a flashback late in the film. Instead, the story jumps ahead to the aftermath of a robbery that never is presented directly--it is only described by the criminals as they go over what went wrong. The film rather cuts from the introduction of the characters at breakfast to two of the characters returning from the scene of the crime, with one bleeding profusely all over the back seat of the car.
We know that something went wrong. We learn that the police were waiting for the thieves when they arrived. We know that several people were killed because one of the conspirators went crazy and started shooting people. We know that Mr. Orange, as he is called, has been shot but do not know why. The film creates several layers of mystery in this fashion, first by inverting the action without explaining the causes of the effects we can see on the screen, and second by slowly building on the individual personalities of several of the participants as earlier details of the operation are revealed in their separate stories, including the key fact that one of them is an undercover policeman.
Every element in the film is deliberately obscured. The criminals do not know each other's names--each has been given a color as a name. The locale where they meet is never identified, though there are clues that it is the working area of an abandoned mortuary. The precise target of their robbery is not identified, and the robbery itself is never shown. This in itself is a deliberate departure from the standard caper film showing that this particular film has other interests. It is the aftermath that is important, the manner in which the conspirators betray and feel betrayed as well as the way they form loyalties and support the underlying code by which they l...