In this thriller, a woman marries an architect whose house contains his painstaking re-creations of rooms in which brutal murders were committed. Furthermore, there's a first wife which she never knew about and a jealous secretary. The echoes of Hitchcock's Rebecca attracted director Fritz Lang to the project, his third co-producing venture with actress Joan Bennett after The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street. It is visually accomplished but, with Michael Redgrave lacking romantic appeal as the architect, a complicated flashback structure and a climax that combines lurid melodrama with Freudian explanations, the result is heavy going and pretentious.

After a whirlwind romance in Mexico, a beautiful heiress marries a man she barely knows with hardly a second thought. She finds his New York home full of his strange relations, and macabre rooms that are replicas of famous murder sites. One locked room contains the secret to her husband's obsession, and the truth about what happened to his first wife.