In what many think her best, and she calls her favorite role, Ida Lupino plays an impoverished spinster, Ellen Creed, who takes a job as companion to an aging music hall actress living in a cottage on the English moors. From the opening shots of desolate exteriors with crows flapping in the mist, the camera moves to the inside of the remote house and there it remains, setting the stage for suspense, psychological terror, and finally murder. When Ellen imports her two weird sisters (Elsa Lanchester and Edith Barrett), who clutter up the house with found-objects from driftwood to dead birds, the actress, none too stable herself, threatens to send them to an asylum. Her death at the hands of the anguished nurse is one of the great off-screen murders: pearls dropping one by one onto the carpet tell the tale. Lupino at age 23 was a good deal younger than the star of the original stage production (based on a celebrated French murder case) but she achieves a level of authority and a compact intensity that heightens director Charles Vidor's slow, nuanced buildup of suspense.