Margot, a woman in her mid-thirties, lives with her husband Kurt and their young daughter Bibi in their mother-in-law's house.
Only two people, on the fringes of society, seek contact with the increasingly isolated Margot: her daughter Bibi and a mysterious neighbor.
Fassbinder, it seems, opens up a perspective on the social and psychological case history that is no longer so drastic with 'Fear of Fear', but he delivers differently than with 'Warum läuft Herr R.
He makes it clear visually what is going on in Margot's head by repeatedly illustrating her subjects with blurred images.
The eloquent camerawork with which Fassbinder is accustomed does the rest to stage Margot's gradual disappearance from normality: she often stands behind half-open doors, her face half outside, half in the room; the camera observes her through mirrors, which Margot has hung up all over the apartment, or provides extreme close-ups of her face as it drifts from one wordless hysteria to the next in all its wakefulness.
'Fear of fear' is therefore much more verbose than Fassbinder's previous psychological and social collapse studies and ends that phase of the director that was brought about by films such as 'Ali: Fear Eats the Soul', 'Martha' and 'Mutter Küsters' Fahrt zum Himmel' - films that only seemed to be interested in the consequences and not in the symptoms of the downfall.
The normality of the bourgeoisie has caught up with them, 'integrated' - as it is called so pretty and ugly in New High German.