In this mesmerizing, atmospheric Val Lewton–Jacques Tourneur cheapie set in Haiti, voodoo and family-centered psychodrama combine with surreal ease. Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), nurse to Jessica Holland (Christine Gordon), finds herself privy to sexual and colonial skeletons in the Holland family closet that have a bearing on the state of her patient. Falling in love with the man who can read her thoughts as though they were spoken aloud, Betsy has mixed loyalties when it comes to curing his glassy-eyed wife. Like Cat People's Irena, Jessica exudes both malevolent powers and a kind of fragile powerlessness, as she is controlled by some horror within (or without). Haiti's uneasy master-slave relations are recreated in the relationships between men and women in the Holland household. But unlike Irena, the cat's got Jessica's tongue: she is in a permanent sleepwalking trance. The willowy blonde in her uncanny opacity is the unlikely mirror to the hulking guardians of a repressed native culture-“speaking” of Western man's silencing of the Other.