Iris Doriot, a beautiful 30-year-old Parisian, hatches a plan to escape her life with a wealthy banker husband by enlisting a stranger to help fake her kidnapping. She convinces Max Lopez, a mechanic in debt, to go along with the ruse after he fixes her car, hoping the arrangement will set him up financially as well. Iris disappears from the street after a routine lunch with her husband, and soon she is seen hiding in an empty flat she has long watched for a friend. The plan seems straightforward: Iris will stage her own disappearance, and Max will orchestrate the steps to make it look real enough to prompt a ransom.
Max ties Iris up and takes a photograph to send to her husband, paired with a demand for 500,000 euros. The tension of the scheme intensifies when Antoine, the husband and a successful banker, defies the initial instruction not to call the police. The authorities respond with discreet surveillance, placing focus on the train station where Max has directed Antoine to bring the money. Max hesitates at a critical moment: he chooses to board the train instead of collecting the money on the platform, while Antoine remains where he’s been told.
That night, Max returns to the flat to discover a grim scene: Iris is dead, the victim of a head wound. He hides the body under a blanket and later buries it in the woods, attempting to keep the tragedy from reaching the outside world. The investigation opens with detectives Nathalie and Malek, who are wary of a kidnapping but also compelled to trace anyone who might have had a motive against the bank. Their inquiry leads them toward Max, who has a police record and a foreclosed home, painting a picture of someone capable of orchestrating trouble and desperation.
Max denies any involvement as new information surfaces, but a news broadcast soon reveals Iris’s disappearance. The image shown is not Iris; it’s a different woman of a similar age with brown eyes. Panic travels through Max as he rushes back to the woods and exhumes the body—only to discover the correlation: the body matches the woman on television, invalidating his alibi and raising the stakes dramatically.
Meanwhile, Iris—the apparent “fake”—shows up at the bank, where Antoine berates her for resurfacing. She fears that Max will talk to the authorities, but Antoine reassures her that they have constructed a trap so effectively that he won’t expose them. The plot thickens when Max follows Antoine to an exclusive sex club for fetishists, where the illusion of Iris is continued by a performer named Claudia. A flashback reveals the chilling sequence: after Max ties Claudia up and exits the flat, she frees herself and drags Iris’s corpse, now stiff with rigor mortis, onto the bed.
The police press Iris’s psychiatrist for insights, leading to a deeper look at Antoine’s private life. He admits a taste for S&M and hiring prostitutes, a confession that unsettles him as officers probe for links to Iris’s disappearance. Nervous, Antoine phones Max and arranges a meeting, insisting that the setup was designed to ruin him, yet they hadn’t anticipated Max taking responsibility for Iris’s death. He suggests that if Max claims ownership, all his debts could be erased.
But Max does not follow that path. He abducts Claudia herself, flipping the dynamic once more. A flashback reveals Iris’s prior actions: she had tracked Antoine to a session, attacked Claudia, and triggered a lethal fight in which Claudia acted in self-defense to kill Iris. Claudia is now held captive by Max, and he again demands 500,000 euros from Antoine, who pays to avoid a public unraveling of the truth.
In a tense turn of events, Max calls Antoine and implies that Claudia is at the flat, but instead takes her to a hotel where they share a sexual encounter. When Antoine arrives, he discovers Iris’s body at the flat rather than Claudia, a devastating realization that spurs him to haul Iris’s corpse to his château in Normandy and attempt to bury it in a grave he digs himself, all while police surveillance closes in. The scene crescendos as law enforcement arrives just as Antoine shoots himself, collapsing into the open grave on top of Iris.
The emotional and financial tension finally resolves in a stark closing moment: the next morning, Max and Claudia part ways, each walking away with half of the money and the consequences of a chain of betrayals that spiraled far beyond a single kidnapping ruse. The film lingers on the consequences of desperation, deception, and the cost of trying to outmaneuver a system that binds people to their secrets.
