Luc Moullet describes a quartet of Lang films-Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, and House by the River-as "psychoanalytic criminal melodramas. After the struggle against Nazism, here is the struggle against oneself." In this crisply directed thriller, a mild flirtation draws a college professor into a hopelessly tangled web of blackmail and murder. The story mirrors the harsh geometry and stringent fatalism of Lang's visual style-as Tom Kemper wrote, "everything that stimulates our dark attraction to the noir genre: the claustrophobic urban studio sets, the wide-awake camerawork, the restless shadows, the nocturnal temptress, and the lapsed hero. Edward G. Robinson is Lang's Everyman, a psychology professor whose obsession with the problem of murder and motive turns real when he is forced to commit one himself. As in a recurring dream, the guilt-ridden Robinson is led through the crime scenes by his D.A. friend (Raymond Massey), maintaining a world-closing-in feeling down to the film's own closure, which is both inevitable and surprising."