When Dr. Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) gets into a horrible car accident with his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), Christiane's face is horribly disfigured. Along with his assistant Louise (Alida Valli), Dr. Genessier makes it his mission to find a new face for his beloved daughter the only way he knows how. He kidnaps lovely young girls in order to remove their faces to implant onto his daughters body. What comes next is a series of complicated and unsuccessful surgeries, but Dr. Genessier keeps his eyes on the prize, always thinking the next surgery will be the one to return the beauty of his disfigured daughter. In the meantime, Christiane is left to deal with one failed transplant after another, always dealing with the rise of hope, and then falling into despair over the loss of her beauty, and the loss of her fiance Jacques (Francois Guerin) who thinks that she died long ago in the car crash.