The characters range in age from high school seniors to early college age. With his portrait of middle class youth, Antonioni has taken a different track from other films at that time which portrayed youthful criminals as primarily lower-class and uneducated. Where I Vinti is of interest is in presenting the students when they are with each other. The young people are shown as self-absorbed, shallow, and callous. Especially in the French sequence, it is easy to imagine these kids growing up to be Alain Delon or Monica Vitti in L'Eclisse, or the travelers of L'Avventura. The murders that take place are almost beside the point, which is why the film met with censorship problems. Antonioni's heart and head are more interested in portraying the sense of alienation that his characters feel, from their homes and families, and from each other.

The varying degrees of indifference of the three murderers also suggests that Antonioni may have been seeking to create a filmic equivalent to Albert Camus' The Stranger. That Antonioni has been linked with Camus is not new, especially in discussion on The Passenger. The main difference would be that Camus' character of Meursault is more self-reflective than Antonioni's young men. Although not referring to the auther in connection to this film, Antonioni has perhaps left a clue regarding his own motivations: The principle behind the cinema, like that behind all the arts, rests on a choice. It is, in Camus' words, "the revolt of the artist against the real."