Desperate for work following an illness, Julia Ross (Nina Foch) thinks her luck has changed when a new London employment agency offers her chance to become a live-in secretary. Her new employer, wealthy widow Mrs Hughes (Mae Witty), insists she begins immediately, but on her first day she wakes to discover she has been transported to a grand, isolated mansion on the Cornish coast, where everyone insists that her name is actually Marion, and that she is the wife of Mrs Hughes’s volatile son Ralph (George Macready). Will Julia manage to discover what fiendish plot she is at the mercy of, and manage to save herself before it is put into action?

Before he made his name with his more famous Gun Crazy and The Big Combo, cult B-movie director Joseph H. Lewis scored his first box office hit with this taut, twisted thriller, a stylish blend of film noir and gothic melodrama which serves as a bridge between the likes of Gaslight and Vertigo in its focus on the nefarious manipulation of a woman’s identity and her sense of her own sanity.

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