The naval destroyer Vengeur docks in the French port of Brest. There, a handsome Belgian sailor named Querelle, who possesses an innate power of fascination and seduction on everyone around him, betrays and murders Vic, his accomplice in drug trafficking. The burly outcast then goes to a famous brothel run by the eccentric Lysiane, where he will begin a very intense and violent journey of homosexual self- discovery that will change him forever.