In the year 1997, the world has been ravaged by a catastrophic plague known as Rouge's Malady, a disease triggered by toxic cosmetic products that effectively wiped out the planet's sexually mature female population. The remnants of society, primarily men, congregate in sterile, avant-garde institutions like the House of Skin, a dermatological clinic turned research hub where the boundaries of human biology begin to dissolve. The protagonist, Adrian Tripod, wanders through a series of increasingly bizarre organizations, such as the Oceanic Podiatry Group, navigating a landscape defined by clinical detachment and the loss of traditional social structures .

Societal dynamics are governed by a desperate search for a "novel sexuality" to replace the biological imperative lost to the plague. The environment is depicted through the brutalist architecture of 1960s Ontario, which serves as a stand-in for a futuristic, industrialized affluence that has fallen into empty isolation. In this timeline, Earth is a sterile, masculine enclosure where the pursuit of scientific progress—specifically in dermatology and gynecology—has backfired, leading to spontaneous organ mutations and the discharge of strange, multicolored secretions from the human body .

The film’s predictions center on the long-term pathological effects of synthetic chemicals, specifically those found in consumer beauty products, as agents of unintended biological evolution. While the specific extinction of women did not occur by 1997, the film accurately anticipated late-20th-century anxieties regarding endocrine disruptors and the emergence of novel, resistant viral strains. Some critics have retrospectively noted that the film's portrayal of a society obsessed with biological monitoring and the transformation of the flesh bears a prophetic resemblance to the AIDS crisis and modern discussions on gender fluidity and bio-hacking . Because only a few analysis-quality sources specifically bridge the 1970 film with modern predictive accuracy, these comparisons rely on the thematic continuity of David Cronenberg's later, more widely analyzed body of work.