Eliza, a young servant girl in the Baron estate, is horrified when a fire destroys the estate's stables and takes the life of a young maid. She is uneasy as Friedrich, the young man who has inherited the estate after his parents' recent deaths, engages in wild and reckless behavior. Having grown up alongside Friedrich, she feels deeply connected to his life, even though they are separated by social class.
Eliza comes to understand that the only reason the maid was in the stables is because she was meeting Friedrich for a romantic tryst, which led to her accidental death. It is revealed that the dead maid was a wealthy member of another estate posing as a member of the lower class. After this revelation, Friedrich becomes increasingly unstable and develops an obsession with a tapestry in the estate depicting a violent scene of a man killing a woman's lover; he believes the figures in the tapestry move. He soon takes up with a strange girl in a bizarrely-colored car, whom the servants speculate he will marry. Friedrich's body is soon found and it is inferred that he was hit by a car, specifically the car of the girl he was involved with. Eliza reacts by setting the tapestry on fire.