The movie examines the lives of the not-so-fortunate dregs of society through airy but uneven absurdist comedy. The unfortunates of the title are mentally challenged people, some of whom could be termed insane - or merely inane.
A man goes to see his former schoolmate working at a boiler house and persuades him to burn in the furnace the corpse of his communal flat neighbor whom he has just murdered after a quarrel. An orphaned girl gets a job in the archives of the maternity home to find out the identity of her mother who abandoned her years earlier. She finds her, befriends her and takes the first opportunity to throw her into the sea. An old intellectual tries to explain to the neighbor’s five-year-old daughter “all the abomination of her lumpen existence”. The girl feeling hurt for her mother decides to poison the old man with arsenic.
In this affectionate, leisurely paced comedy, an Odessa policeman is out walking his beat when he discovers an adorable infant abandoned in a cabbage patch. He does his duty and takes the baby to an orphanage, but later he and his wife, who have an unusually affectionate and cozy relationship, decide to try and adopt the little one. What they must go through to accomplish that goal is anything but straightforward.
50 year old journalist Kovalev finally gets the chance to become the editor-in-chief of the newspaper. Not wanting to tempt fate, the hero turns to the party organizer for support. And then something unexpected happens, Kovalev's ankle is bitten by a dog, and he becomes a werewolf. Turning into a terrible dog at night, Kovalev has been prowling the city ever since and instilling fear in his readers. Policeman Vasily, the son of an unfortunate journalist, is entrusted to find and neutralize the beast.