Urbane European professor Humbert Humbert has never quite recovered from the "poisonous wound" inflicted on him as a 14-year-old boy by the sudden death of his adolescent love, Annabel. Arriving in a small New England town for a college job, Humbert is about to refuse the humble lodgings offered by babbling widow Charlotte Haze when he spies her nubile pre-teen daughter Lolita cooling off under a lawn sprinkler --- evoking memories of lost Annabel. Humbert moons around, transfixed by the vision that is Lolita, and finally surrenders to passion and the most dangerous kind of desire.