Stephen Neale (Ray Milland), incarcerated in an asylum for the mercy killing of his wife, is released into the chaos of wartime London. A cake purchased at a bizarre bazaar gives Neale unwitting entré into a nightmarish adventure involving a Nazi spy ring, and he finds that, beneath the bombs, nothing is as it was in London, nor is it as it seems. As Grahame Greene put it, "We cannot recognize the villain and we suspect the hero and the world is a small cramped place." Paramount's Ministry of Fear is Lang with shades of Greene, Greene's layered questions of faith here giving way to Lang's sure (and surly) knowledge of fate. But the air of menace survives. As Paul M. Jensen writes in The Cinema of Fritz Lang, the director achieves his aims almost exclusively with atmosphere: "Stillness builds a feeling of anticipation, as if the empty air were waiting for something to fill it...."