The film begins with a shot of the cover of a book (made by the artist) which is decorated with a flowery border and photographic cut-outs of women wearing old-fashioned hats and clothes. Inside the book on the left-hand side is a photographic cut-out of a young woman (Sherman) in her underwear housed in a laminated sleeve underneath the label ‘DOLL’. On the right-hand side underneath the label ‘CLOTHES’ are plastic sleeves containing cut-outs of various outfits. The ‘doll’ comes to life and looks through the selection of clothes, grouped under categories such as ‘SCHOOL’ or ‘CASUAL’. Once dressed, she leaves the book and moves onto an adjacent surface featuring a hair brush, make-up and other accessories. The doll checks her appearance in a mirror, before a pair of large human hands enter the frame, take off the doll’s outfit, and put her and the clothes back into their respective sleeves. Returned to just her underwear, the doll appears to be frustrated, and the book closes. In the film’s credit sequence multiple overlapping cut-outs of the doll in different poses line up across the frame. Tate’s copy of Doll Clothes is number seven in an edition of ten (plus two artist’s proofs).

An office worker named Dorine is called upon to do late work; her computer breaks down and she asks the help of a co-worker, Gary Michaels, who is electrocuted while trying to fix the wires. Dorine dials 911, but hangs up when the call is answered. She places the corpse on a cart, rolls it down to her car, loads it in her trunk, and takes it home, placing it in her furnished basement (we don't see the body until later). Then, seemingly without reason, she goes into a murder spree. She kills Virginia[who?] by poisoning her inhaler tube, taking the second corpse to her basement, placing it on a sofa, next to Gary's. Then comes the turn of two young Girl Scouts who arrive at her door to sell cookies. The young girls join the other corpses in the basement, Dorine seen eating the cookies with relish while working on her new laptop. Intriguingly, she sends messages from Gary to the remaining office workers, implying he is alive and has left the office or his wife. There are three more murders before the movie ends, all planned with cool design and seeming absence of malice. The last scene shows Dorine, after her mother's death, setting fire to her basement, then, sporting a blond wig, driving away in her car, circling a newspaper ad with her pencil for an office job, a look of triumph in her face.(From Wikipedia)