In what is said to be her best and favorite role, Ida Lupino plays an impoverished nurse who takes a job as companion to an aging music-hall actress living in a cottage on the misty English moors. The camera moves from the opening shots of the desolate moors, crows flapping in the mist, to the inside of the remote house, and there it remains for a tale of psychological terror. Lupino imports from London her two weird sisters (Elsa Lanchester and Edith Barrett), who clutter up the house with found objects such as driftwood and dead birds. The actress threatens to send the sisters to an asylum; Lupino does what she must. The actress's death at the hands of the anguished nurse is one of the great off-screen murders. At 23, Lupino was a good deal younger than the star of the stage production, but, with hair pulled back and without make-up, she achieves a level of authority and intensity that augments director Charles Vidor's nuanced build-up of suspense.