A young psychologist realises that the new young director of the nursing home where she works, with whom she slowly falls in love, is suffering from a guilt complex rooted in childhood. With the help of her elderly professor, she succeeds in discovering the origin of the disorders; a murder case is also solved in the process. The film marks the meeting between Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman, who will later also star in The Sin of Lady Considine and Notorius. The story develops as a search for truth in a labyrinth strewn with symbols. For the dream sequence Hitchcock enlisted the help of Salvador Dali; for the soundtrack Miklos Rozsa won an Oscar.

"I just wanted to make the first psychoanalysis film. I wanted to break with the way cinema presents dreams. I asked Selznick to secure the collaboration of Salvador Dalí. The only reason for this was my desire to achieve visual dreams with sharp, clear strokes. I wanted Dalí for the sign of his architecture, the long shadows, the distances that seem endless, the lines that converge in perspective, the shapeless faces' (Alfred Hitchcock). And he wanted Ingrid Bergman for the same reasons as always: to stage the spectacle of an icy blonde lost in a love that could be fatal to her. In reality, Bergman is never algid, her glasses and hair escaping the chignon actually make Dr Petersen one of the sexiest characters of her career. That throbbing Italian title that replaces the enigmatic Spellbound nurtured childish female vocations for psychiatry. But between one step and the next of a psychoanalysis illustrated like a fable, what formidable glimpses this film opens up: poor Gregory Peck, who by ancient trauma hates white and stripes, enters the whiteness of a tiled bathroom, and in an instant we understand "the limitless, cryptic terror that can emanate from objects" (James Agee); then, the return of the repressed, in only two silent shots, is the most concise and chilling we will ever remember. The showdown, with its red-flecked finale, is written on the edge between pathos and cold sweat