Death is what she wants to inflict on the demented man who meted out her diabolical punishment. One fateful night, her husband, a civil rights activist, brings home a new friend. The maiden suddenly decides this doctor is her one-time tormentor. She was blindfolded during her torture and identifies him by voice. She appears to be an unreliable witness to her own shattered life.
Death threatens the viewer's own moral sense and good judgment.
Nothing is simple. The film is in English, this cast is obviously Anglo-American and the story is cited as a fiction. The filmmaking miracle is that Polanski has successfully turned the story into a universal metaphor stripped of specific references to place and time. There is an acute sense of here, now, and a foreboding that this could happen to anyone, including you.