It is the story of a girl of questionable mental stability who escapes from incarceration and ends up at a plantation where she disrupts a working family's daily routines and chemistry.

When first seen, Susana is thrown into a solitary cell with bats and rats for misbehaving and the correction officer says Imagine, she's been here two years and is worse than ever!.

In her cell, she asks for God's help, facing a shadow of the cross formed by the window bars from where a spider crawls away.

Gilles Deleuze in his work Cinema 1: The Movement Image talks about the impulse-image in Susana "that achieves the complete exhaustion of a milieu: mother, servant, son and father.

"[page needed] In his 2015 publication of movie ratings, Leonard Maltin wrote 'Well handled and staged by Brunel till the cop-out finale.