Italy, 1863. Giorgio, a dashing army captain, is enjoying a lusty affair with the married Clara in Milan, until he is ordered to a dusty outpost. There, even as he and Clara exchange passionate love letters, he becomes entangled with Fosca, the invalid cousin of his commanding officer. Fosca, suffering from an undefined illness with both mental and physical manifestations, becomes obsessed with Giorgio, who in turn is both fascinated and repelled by her pure love/unhealthy obsession for him and begins to unravel from the strain of her incessant attentions.

"Everybody's got a right to their dream." begins Assassins, a non-linear examination of nine people each believing in an inalienable right to happiness. If their dreams don't come true, surely someone is to blame. So why not shoot a president? At least it will get you noticed. The assassins, appearing randomly, form a rogues' gallery of killers and would-be killers: anarchic Polish factory worker Leon Czolgosz to kill President William McKinley; megalomaniac Charles Guiteau to shoot President James Garfield; would-be plane hijacker Samuel Byck to crash into President Richard Nixon's White House; John Hinckley, who dedicates his crime to then-teen movie star Jodie Foster with whom he fantasizes a romance; Sara Jane Moore, a bumbler whose gun is forever going off at the wrong time, and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, with her visions of Charley Manson, who aimed for Gerald Ford with an unloaded gun. Ending in a dark, surreal dreamscape with historical presidential assassins urging a suicidal Lee Harvey Oswald to turn the gun away from himself and aim it at the presidential motorcade passing through Dallas. What makes Assassins genuinely challenging, even creepy, is that it stirs up all sorts of provocative questions without providing any answers. It specifically declines to offer the audience the soothing safety of a moral conclusion to either accept or reject. Assassins neither glorifies nor trivializes its characters. Instead, it attempts to take us into their psyches and examine what led to their hideous acts.