Dr. Génessier, a renowned surgeon, causes his beautiful daughter Christiane's face to be horribly mutilated in a car accident. To make his daughter whole, Dr. Génessier enlists his assistant Louise in a devious plot: she follows and befriends beautiful young women, so the doctor can remove their faces in painstaking operations, to graft onto Christiane. Sadly, her body rejects the new faces, and so she wears an emotionless mask to cover up her scars. Dr. Génessier's genuine feelings of love and guilt are balanced by his astonishing arrogance and hubris, pressing the moral and legal limits of science for a single, selfish interest. The results are surely going to be disastrous, and deadly.