Through a vertiginous series of flashbacks, The Locket pits male paranoia against female perversion in a Freudian-inspired psychoanalytic free-for-all. Charming, intelligent Nancy (Laraine Day) is a jewel-obsessed kleptomaniac and murderer-or she isn't. Compulsively jealous Robert Mitchum, alleging himself her first husband, visits her second husband, a psychiatrist, unleashing a fantastical tale of Nancy's criminal tendencies and chronic deceptions. The psychiatrist doesn't believe him, but makes the same charges to her current intended. At the center of these spiraling narratives-within-narratives (told by men whose mental stability is far from certain, à la The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) is Nancy's own voice-over, relating a deeply traumatic childhood in which the “key” to her psyche is revealed as an acute and class-based vulnerability. Is Nancy a clever, disarming psychopath, or has she merely internalized a self-image in response to the persecutory voices in her head? The multiple, dissonant voices and the whirlpool-like movement of the film's structure contribute to a delightfully uncertain resolution where past and present collapse, and what seems obvious may instead be unknowable.