THE STRANGLER

Leo Kroll is a mother-fixated lab technician who collects dolls. He is also a serial killer, responsible for the death of a number of nurses, and is questioned by the police regarding those murders, but is released. Kroll claims his next victim, Clara, the nurse who has been looking after his possessive mother, who is in hospital after a heart attack. However, he leaves a doll behind at the murder scene. (A subplot features Kroll becoming enamored of Tally, one of the girls who works at the amusement park stall from which he won this doll.)

Kroll is again questioned by the police, but successfully passes a lie detector test and is released. He visits his mother in hospital and tells her how he killed Clara, which induces a second, fatal heart attack. Returning to the amusement park, he sees Barbara, Tally's co-worker, talking to the police. This makes Kroll frantic. As Kroll is talking to Barbara about the police, he is visibly nervous. He misses ring after ring while he plays the game. When Barbara mimics one of the dolls by saying "Mama", this reminds Kroll of his mother and finally sets him off. Kroll goes to Barbara's apartment and strangles her as she is stepping out of the shower. The killing of a girl that works at an amusement park stand and not a nurse throws the police off.

Meanwhile, it seems with his mother dead, Kroll finally feels free and it seems his hatred for women is fading. He visits Tally and proposes to her. After he is rejected, Kroll begins to believe in his mind that all the bad things his mother told him about women are true. After questioning Tally and getting a description, the police finally find their strangler. Kroll hides in Tally's apartment and waits to kill her when she comes home. The police, believing Tally could be the strangler's next victim, bug her room and stay close by to catch Kroll. Tally is packing her bag to leave town and ends up covering the bug in her room. The police are unable to hear what is going on when Kroll comes out and begins to strangle Tally. The police burst into the room and open fire. Kroll is hit, goes through the window, and plunges to his death; it is unclear if Tally has survived.

The police track Leo Kroll to Tally's apartment. He attacks Tally, but the police burst in and shoot him; he falls to his death, with Tally's fate left ambiguous.

The ending resolves the central threat by eliminating Kroll, yet refuses a neatly reassuring closure by leaving Tally's survival uncertain. This ambiguous final note reinforces the film's themes of psychological instability and the incomplete catharsis of justice—echoing 1960s anxieties about hidden dangers lurking beneath ordinary surfaces.