Directed by Jacques Tourneur • 1944 • United States
Starring Hedy Lamarr, George Brent, Paul Lukas

Master of mood Jacques Tourneur brings an air of anxious uncertainty to this tantalizing psychological mystery. A chance encounter aboard a train plunges an inquisitive doctor (George Brent) into sinister goings-on at a turn-of-the-century Manhattan mansion, where the disturbed wife (Hedy Lamarr) of a wealthy social lion may—or may not—be going mad. What plays out is an unsettlingly ambiguous tale of illusion versus reality told in a complex web of flashbacks and shifting viewpoints and etched in the director’s typically intricate mise-en-scène.