A mysterious femme fatale asks an unwitting stranger to mind her handbag. She disappears.

Moments later, he receives a mysterious phone call. If he wants to stay alive, he has to follow her instructions to the letter... A simple matter of murder.

Stiletto is a darkly comic thriller that pays affectionate homage to the Master of Suspense. Its story contains the staple ingredients: an innocent everyman, a love interest, a Hitchcock Blonde, a MacGuffin, and a situation of extreme jeopardy.

The innocent everyman is often seen in Hitchcock's films. Whether it's Robert Donat in The 39 Steps or Cary Grant in North By Northwest, many Hitchcock films start with a man in an everyday situation that quickly turns into something more sinister. In Stiletto, our innocent everyman is an artist who likes simple things in life: coffee, and doodling in his sketchbook.

The MacGuffin is an industry term for an object which serves to drive the plot of a film. Often, the object itself performs no actual function but all the characters in the film live or die for it. Famous MacGuffins include the black ornamental bird in The Maltese Falcon; the golden idol that Indiana Jones 'liberates' at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark; and the 'Rabbit's Foot' in Mission: Impossible III. The bright red handbag that is placed on the table in Stiletto soon becomes the MacGuffin and is present in nearly every scene.

Hitchcock was known for his love of blonde actresses. There's been much written on the subject, and many theories floated as to why Hitch liked his leading ladies to have a hint of peroxide - such as Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, Tippi Hedren and Janet Leigh. Beth Winslet makes a fantastic addition to the canon of Hitchcock Blondes, styled to look like 1950s star Veronica Lake.

Why the homage to Hitch? Stiletto was funded by Apex Arts and Film London/Waltham Forest's Hitchcock Production Fund. The fund eligibility criteria was that the filmmakers must be living within the Waltham Forest area and the director currently resides in Leytonstone - birthplace of the great man himself.