Ten strangers are summoned by a mysterious host named Mr. Owen to travel to Africa and join him on a safari he is hosting. Capt. Philip Lombard guides the entourage with the aid of local natives through the jungle, setting a tense, suspenseful mood from the start.
As the group settles into the hunting camp, things grow ominous: the native guides vanish, and the bridge that would let them come and go is cut, leaving eight guests plus the Rodgers couple isolated. Mr. Owen is nowhere to be seen, and a chilling gramophone recording after dinner accuses each person of a murder for which they had somehow escaped punishment.
The first death arrives quickly—Anthony Marston chokes after a poisoned martini, a cruel echo of the nursery rhyme that decorates the dining room, where one of the Indian dolls loses its head. By morning, Ethel Mae Rodgers lies dead in her bed, possibly from an overdose, seemingly fulfilling the rhyme’s second verse. Fear and paranoia take hold as the guests sense they are being hunted by a malevolent killer.
Disaster compounds when Gen. Brancko Romensky is pushed off a cliff during a doomed search for their host. The realization dawns that Mr. Owen might be among them, and the radio has been sabotaged leaving the group marooned with dead cameras and blank ammunition. The tension escalates as the Rodgers' son and wife fall under suspicion, and the group’s nerves fray.
Next, Rodgers himself dies, an axe buried in his head, followed by the death of Marion Marshall, who succumbs to a poison-filled syringe. The mounting bodies push Capt. Philip Lombard to attempt repairs on the radio, hoping to summon help from the outside world. A spotter plane is finally promised for the next morning, but the nightmare continues as fear drives the remaining guests to confess their guilt in the secrecy of the night.
A violent storm breaks loose, and Mr. Justice Lawrence Wargrave is found dead, shot in the head. Dr. Hans Yokem Werner follows, dying from a slit throat. The remaining survivors, including Det. William Henry Blore, barricade themselves in a tent, yet the next dawn reveals Blore stabbed to death in the chest.
With only Lombard and Vera Claythorne left, a tense confrontation unfolds. Vera shoots Lombard in a moment of desperate self-preservation, then returns to the common tent where a living Wargrave—now in full judicial robes and wig, with a noose prepared for Vera—awaits. Wargrave reveals how Werner helped him fake his own death to spy on the others, exposing it as the red herring of the rhyme. He confesses to killing Werner and explains his terminal illness and his plan for a private, grand-scale “hunt” to mete out justice to those who had escaped the hangman. He pulls the chair from beneath Vera and, as she struggles, drinks poisoned wine and dies. Lombard reappears, alive but grazed by Vera’s shot, and the two of them escape together as a rescue plane finally arrives on the scene.
