Bent is a screen adaptation of Martin Sherman's highly acclaimed 1979 play. The film begins in a surreal cabaret in Berlin run by a transvestite singer (Mick Jagger). When the Nazis begin their campaign to exterminate homosexuals, Max (Clive Owen) and his lover Rudy (Brian Webber) flee.

Unable to get across the border to Amsterdam, they are captured and put aboard a train bound for Dachau. Horst (Lothaire Bluteau), a homosexual who wears his pink triangle with pride, gives Max wise advice that enables him to survive the journey. Following the death of Rudy, Max decides to opt for the yellow triangle, signifying he is a Jew.

The rest of "Bent" focuses upon the spiritual strategies of these two courageous men to survive the terrors, humiliations, and tortures of the concentration camp. With no way to express their growing love for each other, Max and Horst find imaginative ways to lift each other's spirits.

Director Sean Mathias has made a very stylized yet substantive movie about the plight of homosexuals in the Holocaust. The film pays tribute to the soul's yearning for freedom as an affirmation of life on the doorstep of death.