With haunting visual intensity and in regular bursts of free associative montage, the film presents scenes from the fantastic lives of the inmates of an insane asylum. Starting with a dancing madwoman, the film disorients us with double, triple and quadruple exposures, drawing us into a rapid disorienting maelstrom of hallucinations and ghosts of the past, leaving us with a vivid sense of ghostly madness. Without the aid of intertitles, but using only the purely cinematic means of framing, montage and rhythm, this most fascinating and terrifying of all asylum films makes all other attempts to visualise the subjective experience of mental and emotional confusion look downright childish by comparison.