Jane Baker, a woman living in New Orleans, is carrying on an affair with a man, Fred, behind her husband's and children's backs.

Jane carries on trysts with Fred in an apartment she rents in a boarding house owned by Mrs. Duval, whose blind adult son Robert also lives in the building.

While Jane is meeting with Fred for sex, Lucy drowns her little brother Michael in the bathtub and stages it as an accident.

When Jane receives news of the death over the phone, Fred offers to drive her home, but they crash into a guardrail en route.

Instead, she makes a shrine for Fred in the apartment, and tends to an unseen item locked in the refrigerator freezer box.

Suspicious, Robert has a friend obtain newspaper articles regarding the car accident that killed Fred, and he learns that Jane has been in a psychiatric hospital for the last year.

That afternoon, Lucy arrives at the boardinghouse and convinces Robert to allow her into her mother's apartment, where she leaves a photo of her deceased brother on a table.

On the anniversary of her son Michael's death, Jane spends the day in town and visits his grave.

During the meal, Jane finds an earlobe in her soup, and horrifiedly realizes Lucy has used flesh from Fred's severed head in the recipe.

Robert enters Jane's apartment and she violently attacks him, but he kills her by smashing her face into the hot oven.

He screams for Lucy, and crawls over Jane's bed, where suddenly Fred's severed head attacks him, biting his neck.