The black-and-white film noir drama is about a woman who suspects her new husband, an architect, plans to kill her.

On her wedding day, rich heiress Celia refuses all proposals in New York, goes to Mexico for a vacation, and falls in love with architect Mark Lamphere.

Celia receives the copy of the key she made, enters the seventh room, which is an exact duplicate of her and Mark's bedroom.

She concludes that it does commemorate Eleanor's death until Celia notices that the dresser candles are uneven in the same way they are in the real bedroom now.

Channeling the psychological theories advanced about murderers at the party, she begs him to remember what happened in his childhood to make him this way.

When Mark was ten, his mother promised to read to him before she left to go dancing, but he found himself locked in his room as she departed.

His pounding and screaming were in vain, and his love for his mother was transmuted into hate, which was transferred to Celia when she locked the door of their honeymoon room.

But Mr. Lang is still a director who knows how to turn the obvious, such as locked doors and silent chambers and roving spotlights, into strangely tingling stuff.

And that's why, for all its psycho-nonsense, this film has some mildly creepy spots and some occasional faint resemblance to Rebecca which it was obviously aimed to imitate.

[7] New York's PM was highly critical in 1948: "what they [Wanger, Lang, Bennett and Redgrave] have come up with is an utterly synthetic 'psychological' suspense incredibility wrapped in a gravity so pretentious it is to laugh, wherein all the actors stalk and stare like zombies while the sound track babbles fancy words.