Seeking background material for an occult-based novel he is working on, writer Charles Condomine [Rex Harrison] invites the eccentric medium Madame Arcati [Margaret Rutherford] to his home in Lympne, Kent, to conduct a séance. The gathering includes Charles, his wife Ruth Condomine [Constance Cummings] and their guests, Dr. George Bradman [Hugh Wakefield] and Violet Bradman [Joyce Carey], who barely restrain their laughter as Arcati performs peculiar rituals and eventually slips into a trance. During the convulsive hush that follows, Charles hears the voice of his dead first wife, Elvira [Kay Hammond]. When he discovers that the others cannot hear her, he evasively passes off his odd behavior as a joke. Yet Arcati, recovered from her trance, is sure something extraordinary has occurred, even as everyone else denies it.
After Arcati and the Bradmans depart, Charles tries in vain to persuade Ruth that he was serious about hearing his late wife. Yet Elvira soon appears again, but only for Charles. He is alternately dismayed and amused by the situation, and his attempts to convince Ruth become increasingly fraught as she suspects he is playing the fool. Elvira’s appearances grow bolder the next evening, further muddling the living room’s boundaries between past and present. The tension between Charles and Ruth thickens until he coaxes Elvira to act as a poltergeist, moving a vase and a chair before Ruth. Elvira’s antics terrify Ruth, who flees the room in fear.
Desperate, Ruth seeks Madame Arcati’s help again, hoping to banish Elvira back to wherever she came from. Arcati, though, admits she does not quite know how to do so. Ruth warns Arcati that Elvira is trying to be reunited with Charles by steering him toward his own demise. But the plan backfires on Ruth: the living woman ends up dead in a car she has tampered with, leaving a vengeful Ruth, now a ghost herself, to torment Elvira as she clings to life on the earthly plane a little longer.
With the danger and confusion mounting, Charles returns to Arcati, seeking her expertise once more. A series of incantations fails until Arcati realizes that it was the Condomines’ maid Edith [Jacqueline Clarke] who summoned Elvira in the first place. Arcati appears to succeed in sending the spirits away, but it soon becomes clear that both women have remained in the living world in some form. Following Arcati’s suggestion, Charles leaves on a long vacation, hoping to escape the supernatural upheaval. Yet fate intervenes when he suffers a fatal car accident while departing; the incident is implied to be the work of Ruth and Elvira. In the end, Charles joins his late wives as a spirit, completing a haunting circle where the living and the dead are bound by unresolved desires and the restless pull of the past, a truth seen through Arcati’s unsettled, searching eyes and the ever-present, guiding narration of Noël Coward [nol-coward].
