Summary
In the hushed parlors of a town that never quite wakes, Frederick Osborn—midnight-oil accountant, human ledger—lets the hearth grow cold while columns of figures pulse like arteries. His wife Frances, porcelain-pale yet quietly volcanic, drifts into the orbit of two velvet-gloved drifters: a cardsharp with a poet’s mouth and a widow who smells of clove cigarettes and shipwrecked money. They pitch camp in the marital gloom, dealing not cards but promises—of attention, of escape, of a reckless trinity. Frederick, suddenly alert, smells danger the way a bloodhound sniffs September thunder; he stalks their candle-lit soirées, half-cuckold, half-customs agent, rifling through glances as if they were contraband. The film’s tension coils around who truly owns the house: the man who paid for the wallpaper or the woman who finally decides to peel it off, strip by strip, revealing the damp dreams beneath.
Synopsis
Frederick Osborn is too busy to tend to his family duties and his wife Frances feels neglected. But Frederick's attention is caught when his wife takes up with a pair of companions to whom she is devoted, but whom he sees as more than a little shady.
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