Adaptation of Stella Gibbons's comic novel of the same name. Following the death of her parents, 20-year-old Flora Poste (Sarah Badel) finds herself alone with insubstantial means in 1930s London. Fascinated by the little she knows of her distant relatives the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex, she goes to stay with her aunt Judith Starkadder (Rosalie Crutchley) and a colourful array of cousins. There she finds a variety of earthy, passionate relations, dominated by Great Aunt Ada Doom (Fay Compton) who long ago saw "something nasty in the woodshed" and now holds the rest of the household in thrall. Flora decides to put to rights the lives of all of them.

Hélène Noris, a young Belgian woman from a bourgeois family, is haunted by a past affair with Tamara — now married to her father. Torn between desire and resentment toward Tamara’s conformist life, Hélène feels alienated in the provincial world she inhabits. To boost his social image, her stepfather René invites Parisian director Jean Gerfaud to stage an avant-garde version of Tartuffe. Tamara flirts with him, but Hélène seduces him first. A passionate, destructive affair begins, entangling love, jealousy, and ambition. When the play’s scandalous premiere sparks outrage, Jean marries Hélène, provoking Tamara’s fury. Yet Hélène, restless and defiant, betrays him with a soldier. In rage and humiliation, Jean confronts her in the “red room,” the space that once embodied their love and now their ruin.

When a government official disappears in the London tunnels, after several reports of missing people in the same location, Scotland Yard start to take the matter seriously, along with a couple who stumble into a victim by accident.