Motorist Jane Lindstrom has a tire blowout and seeks assistance at an estate owned by Caligari, a very polite man with a Swedish accent.

After spending the night there, she finds that Caligari will not let her leave; he proceeds to ask some personal questions and shows her pictures that offend her.

She finds only three possible candidates: the older Paul, the younger Mark, for whom she has romantic desires, and a lively elderly woman named Ruth.

After her attempts fail, Caligari reveals that he and Paul are one and the same person, Jane runs down a corridor of wildly shifting imagery that acts as a transition.

Finally, it is revealed that Jane is a mental patient and everything the audience has seen up to this point has been her distortion of the institute she was in: the personal questions were psychoanalysis, the pictures were Rorschach blots, Ruth's torture was shock treatment, and even Caligari's coat of arms was a distorted version of the medical caduceus symbol.

[1] He assigned the project to French-born Roger Kay, who had directed Grand Guignol theatre in Paris and New York.

[3] The director Roger Kay persuaded Robert Bloch "to drop the Dr from the original title but do a story with enough similarity to be recognizable as an homage.