Mark (Karlheinz Bohm, credited here as Carl Boehm), a reclusive, voyeuristic focus puller and photography enthusiast forms an awkward friendship with a female neighbour that threatens to expose his secret obsession - murdering women in order to capture a record of their expression at the moment of death.

Michael Powell's sleazy horror-drama has aged remarkably well since it first baited the national newspapers with its provocative and upsetting presentation of a disturbed man's brutal hobby. Upon release it was effectively sunk by the critics, who were upset by the subject matter and the ruthless incrimination of the viewer with inventive camera work. The film eventually resurfaced thanks to a new generation of directors (including Martin Scorsese) who cited it as an influence.

Bohm excels in the lead, emotionally crippled hi is an uncomfortable presence on screen, making the viewer squirm whenever he comes into contact with a woman. The explanation for his dysfunctional behaviour lies in his childhood. As we soon learn, his father forced him to grow up on camera as the subject of bizarre experiments, often engineering cruel and torturous circumstances in order to elicit a response. As a result, Mark is unable to relate to reality or people in the flesh, only through the camera lens he spends much of the film hiding behind.