A group of university students gather after class at a café called Eden, where they engage in enigmatic rituals and games—such as a simulated Russian roulette and pretend scenarios of poisoning one of their own—creating a mood of eerie play and mystery. One evening an older stranger named Duchemin [Pierre Zimmer] enters Eden and captivates them with deft magic tricks, blurring the lines between illusion and reality. He dares the group to test their nerve, asking them to pick up broken glass with bare hands and, astonishingly, heals the wounds instantly, claiming this ability came from experiences he had in Africa. The unsettling atmosphere deepens as he offers a drug he calls “fear powder,” which one of the students, Violette [Catherine Jourdan], accepts.
Under the drug’s spell, Violette is thrust into a torrent of vivid visions—terrifying, lurid images of torture and murder—that alternately gnaw at fear and provoke uncontrollable laughter. The next morning, she agrees to meet Duchemin later that night in an abandoned factory, driven by a mix of curiosity and compulsion. Once inside, she becomes immersed in a nightmarish sequence of hallucinatory episodes, including a shocking moment when a semen-like substance oozes from a pipe. She finally exits the factory at dawn, shaken and altered by what she has witnessed. In the wake of these events, Duchemin is found dead at the foot of a staircase overlooking the canal, a Tunisia-bound postcard tucked into his pocket as if a clue left behind.
Returning home, Violette discovers that a valuable painting has been stolen from her possession, a disorienting reversal that compounds the mystery surrounding the man she met at Eden. Her search leads her to Tunisia, where she encounters Duchemin’s doppelgänger, a figure known as Dutchman, and she becomes his lover, stepping further into a strange double-life. A gang of thugs—disconcertingly resembling the Eden students—kidnaps her, imprisoning and torturing her for reasons that remain obscured. Yet she finds a way to fight back with help from an unexpected quarter: a doppelgänger of her own emerges to assist in the escape, allowing her to seize back the painting.
In the aftermath, she locates Dutchman dead again, this time at a seaside staircase—the same eerie spot that recalled the moment of Duchemin’s death earlier. The painting is recovered, but the danger and the illusions do not fade completely. Back home, Violette narrates that nothing has happened yet, or perhaps everything was merely a fantasy, a hallucinatory premonition, or a dream that lingers just on the edge of waking. The tale remains shrouded in ambiguity, leaving her to wonder what, if anything, truly occurred.
