Rope stars John Dall and Farley Granger as two students from Harvard University who murder a former classmate as an intellectual exercise. After hiding his body in a chest in their luxurious Manhattan apartment, they host a dinner party in the same room, horrifically including the murdered man's unsuspecting parents and fiancee among the guests. Another guest is their former prep school headmaster, now publisher Rupert Cadell (played by Jimmy Stewart) with whom, back in their school days, they had discussed the philosophy of Nietzsche's ubermensch and Thomas De Quincey's On Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts. "Ubermensch" refers to the concept of a new, superior modern man who, having rejected belief in the existence of a higher power, will make his own morals and values. De Quincey's work is a satire- a speech made at a gentleman's club about admiring murder done with artistic flair.
As the evening and the dinner party play out almost in real time, Cadell begins to suspect that his two former students have carried their discussions beyond the theoretical to the empirical.