A woman (Joan Crawford) in a near catatonic state is found wandering the streets and tells her story as a series of flashbacks. She is a nurse employed by a wealthy family to look after the wife and is involved with both the husband (Raymond Massey) and an engineer (Van Helfin) he employs. When the wife dies in tragic circumstances, she begins her journey into a psychotic illness, this is complicated by tangle of relationships and that the daughter (Geraldine Brooks) of the husband is also in love with the engineer. The strength of the film is the complexity of the characters and the performance of Joan Crawford. She moves between, charming to paranoid and psychotic and draws the viewer into all her emotions.