Following a near-death experience, a young woman flees her East German hometown and failed marriage to start over in Hanover. By chance she finds work with an ambitious and determined executive and enters a ruthless world of big business and cut-throat boardroom deals. But just as she seems poised to fully realize her ambitions, she finds herself haunted by truths from the past that threaten to destroy her new life.

A thriller about a woman fighting off a sleazy blackmailer. The film was Hitchcock's first full-length sound film and was only his second foray into the suspense genre. Grocer's daughter Alice White kills a man in self-defense when he tries to sexually assault her. Her policeman boyfriend, Detective Frank Webber, covers up for her, but she has been spotted leaving the scene by a petty criminal who starts to blackmail her.

"Wanda is a maladjusted, troubled woman who leaves her husband with whom she readily agrees to leave the children. She attaches herself to a small-time thief because he at least seems to need her a little. The thief finds her a useful accomplice and plans a bank robbery. It fails, he is shot, and Wanda is alone again"--Film Index International.