The Paris Apartment

The show ends, and while others file out of the club, Jess and Theo sneak into the door they saw many men go through. They go downstairs and run into one of the dancers, who looks alarmed and tells them they can’t be there. They keep going, but before they pass through another door, the doorman stops them and brings them back up to the bar where the show took place. A tall, dark figure stares at them from a corner, but before Jess can get a better look, the doorman throws them out of the club. As Theo and Jess leave the alley, they are followed by the tall brunette dancer.

The concierge notices that the Meunier family are meeting and knows they are likely discussing the issue of Jess. The concierge feels defensive over Jess, who reminds her of her daughter. The concierge tried to warn Jess privately by slipping a note under her door, but when Jess opened the door and caught her, the concierge got nervous.

The concierge enjoyed Ben’s company. One time, over tea, he asked again about her daughter. The concierge revealed that she’s from Albania and had moved to Paris when her daughter, who had moved to Paris to pursue a career as a dancer, called her in tears because her job ended up being scandalous and she got pregnant. By the time the concierge could arrange a visa and the money to get to France, her daughter had already had the baby. The concierge went to her club to track her down, and the other dancers told the concierge that her daughter died in childbirth. She revealed to Ben that the reason she stayed was for her granddaughter, who lives in the apartment building.

Mimi escapes the fighting of her family and takes a break in her apartment. Camille comes into her room and asks her if she’s been acting strangely lately because of the mysterious boy she was interested in. Mimi curses at her. Camille packs her bags and reveals that she has been sleeping with Antoine’s ex-wife, Dominique. Now that Dominique moved out, Camille can leave too and be with her.

Mimi recalls how, one day while Ben was out, she snuck into his apartment and disrobed, keeping on the new lingerie she bought with Camille. She wanted to surprise Ben in bed, but he was taking a while, so she started looking around his apartment. She found his journal and started reading, discovering that he was writing about her. Wanting to know more, she broke into his laptop by guessing the password, taking her successful guess as a sign that she and Ben were meant to be. A computer document was labeled with her family’s name. After reading the document, she immediately regretted it.

The dancer leads Theo and Jess out of the wealthy neighborhood and into a less touristy, more private all-night kebab place. Settled in, she introduces herself as Irina, a name Jess recognizes from Ben’s journal. Theo agrees to pay her for information. Irina tells them that she moved to Paris for a dance job but discovered what happens after the show, in the room where the men were sneaking off to. Because sex work is illegal in France, wealthy and powerful men come to the club to abuse trafficked women. In the back room, these club members use wine purchases as code: Each wine brand and date is a code for a certain “type” of woman. Many of the women don’t have the legal paperwork to be in France, and their traffickers possess their passports, entrapping them in a cycle of commercialized sexual assault.

Though she doesn’t know the names of the men, Irina knows that they are high up in French society and government, even within the police department. Ben provided her with a camera, which she’s been using to take photos of the men. Irina gives the photographs to Jess. She insists that some of the women are happier at the club than in their previous homes, and that there’s a story circulating that one of the women married the club owner. But many of the women get pregnant or sick. One had her baby in the club and died during childbirth; it was all easily swept under the rug because she lacked documented citizenship. Irina confides that she’s sick from an STI and wants out. Ben promised to get her out of her situation in exchange for information.

Ben had been writing an exposé on Mimi’s father and his sex-trafficking club; this was the document Mimi read on his computer. When she realized that she was somehow connected to this horrible place, it shook her already fragile sense of self. Before she could finish reading, she heard Ben coming back into the apartment, so she hid in the closet. There was a knock at the apartment door, and Ben let in her mother, Sophie; Mimi saw them have sex. When Mimi finally left, she angrily cut apart her paintings of Ben. She was pleased with her private act of violence but knew it wasn’t enough.

As Jess and Theo leave Irina, Theo expresses excitement that Ben was onto such a huge story. Angry with Theo for thinking only of this possible scoop, Jess runs away from him, crying, but she gets lost and finds herself in the thick of a major protest. The protest descends into violence when armed police arrive and attack the protestors. Caught in the chaos, Jess bumps into Theo, and they escape by finding a nearby bar bathroom. Theo admits that he’s excited about the story but insists that he’s worried about Ben. Theo helps Jess ease the pain of the tear gas in her eyes, and they kiss and have sex in the bathroom.

After the family meeting ends, Antoine stays back. He reveals himself to be Sophie’s extortionist. Though his father always kept Sophie’s background a secret, Antoine always had his suspicions. He searched through his father’s records and discovered the truth about how Sophie and Jacques met: Sophie used to be trapped at the trafficking club—and Jacques, the owner, married her. Antoine has been extorting her because Dominique plans on walking away from the marriage with a large chunk of his money.

As Jess and Theo walk to the metro, he insists that she stay with him and not go back to Meuniers’ building. Jess hears the sounds of footsteps running toward them, and Theo is tackled by four police officers who search his pockets and find a baggie of cocaine. He accuses them of planting the drugs on him, and Jess recognizes Commissaire Blanchot, the same police officer to whom she and Nick gave their statement about Ben. Jess gets on the metro just before the police officers reach for her.

Antoine demands his money and implies that he knows about Sophie’s affair with Ben. He pulls out his phone and threatens to call Jacques, but Sophie calls him on his bluff and dares him to make the call. She told Ben her real identity but noticed that his questions had the tone of a journalist. Ashamed that she opened up to someone who wanted to use her story, Sophie regrets the affair but knows that Jacques is more concerned about appearances than anything else.

Jess is aware of the danger that awaits her in the apartment building, but she has a gut feeling that she needs to return. It reminds her of the day from her childhood when she had the intuition that she should stay home from school to be with her mother. She ignored that feeling and went to school, but when she came home, she discovered that her mother had died of an overdose. Now as Jess looks back on it, she resolves to never again ignore her instincts.

When Jess enters the apartment building, she sees the concierge collapsed at the bottom of the stairs. She finds a pulse but senses that this wasn’t an accident.

Jess reaches for her phone to call for an ambulance but remembers that she gave her phone to the doorman to enter La Petite Mort. She tries to leave for help but discovers that she’s been locked into the building. The concierge starts to move, and she sits up, begging Jess not to call an ambulance or the police. Nick appears on the stairwell, inviting Jess for a talk.

Jess accuses Nick of hurting the concierge, but he insists it wasn’t him. Privately, he knows it must have been Antoine. Nick tries to assure Jess that he wants to help her.

Three days earlier, Mimi told Nick about what she’d read on Ben’s computer, about how their family’s wealth isn’t from wine but from sex trafficking. Mimi worries that she’s not actually biologically related to her brothers, a suspicion Antoine and Nick have always harbored. Nick found out about the trafficking on his 16th birthday when Jacques gave him a “sex worker,” who was actually a woman whom Jacques was trafficking. Ben knew about this birthday trauma, which explains why he later reached out to Nick in Paris. From the very beginning, Ben was using Nick for a story.

The first-floor apartment door opens, and Antoine enters the stairwell. Jess manages to get into the lift and tries to beat Nick to the third floor. She gets into Ben’s apartment but hears someone unlocking the door. She rushes toward the maids’ staircase, but Nick stops her. She demands to know what happened to Ben, and Nick insists that he had nothing to do with it. Ben’s cat lunges at Nick, giving Jess the opportunity to grab a knife from the kitchen and run out the door. In the hallway, she runs into Antoine. She rushes at him with the knife, taking him by surprise and making him fall down the stairs. She has no way to escape but by ascending toward the penthouse.

Mimi hides in her apartment while the commotion in the building begins. Sophie comes in to comfort her and coaxes her to stay in the apartment while Sophie goes out to help. Mimi is afraid of being left alone with her thoughts and feelings.

Jess runs up the stairs toward the penthouse, continuing her upward spiral by using the ladder that leads to the maids’ quarters. Once inside, she notices the dank smell of the attic. She sees a body on a mattress and screams.

Mimi hears Jess’s screams that they’ve killed Ben. Mimi has memories of blood and a knife in her hand; she remembers Sophie dragging her into the shower to wash the blood off and promising to keep her safe. When Jess arrived and said her brother was missing, Mimi realized that these memories might be real and that she might have killed Ben.

Sophie, too, hears the screams about Ben having been killed. She remembers when she and the concierge found Mimi in Ben’s apartment, leaning over a dead body and screaming about the club. They helped clean Mimi and get rid of the evidence, wrapping the corpse in a sheet. Antoine and Nick walked in as Sophie was cleaning the blood off the floor with bleach. She told them that Ben had found out about the club and that Jacques had him killed.

Jess screams over Ben’s body but suddenly sees his hand twitch and his eyes open. Sophie and Nick enter the attic.

Nick dealt with the guilt of Ben’s death for days, but he notices that Sophie doesn’t seem shocked to see Ben in the attic. Nick and Antoine dug a grave in the courtyard garden and buried the dead body, which they’d believed was Ben.

Mimi remembers watching Ben from her window after she tore up the paintings. She saw her father walk into the apartment and attack Ben repeatedly with a bottle of wine. Certain that her father was trying to kill Ben, Mimi ran over to the apartment with her knife. Despite Ben’s betrayal, she loved him. And she now realized her father was a very bad man, so she attacked him to save Ben.

Nick was the one to tell his father about Ben’s investigation into the trafficking. He remembers feeling both pleased and guilty that he betrayed Ben, and he took several pills to lull himself to sleep. He heard the commotion upstairs through a haze. When he and Antoine got to Ben’s apartment, they found Sophie cleaning up blood. She told them there had been an accident. He and Antoine buried the shrouded body without looking at the face.

Sophie remembers how, to protect her daughter, she used Jacques’s phone to text her stepsons as though she were Jacques. She hid Ben in the attic, keeping him alive over the last three days but not knowing what to do with him. She had implied to Antoine and Nick that their father needed to distance himself from the situation, telling them to keep his presence in Paris that night a secret.

Sophie reveals the truth of what happened that night. Jess begs her to let them go and promises that when she brings Ben to the hospital, she’ll make up a story and tell no one about the Meuniers.

Jess assures Sophie that she won’t go to the police; her father was a well-respected police officer but was abusive to her mother, so from the very beginning, Jess has never trusted the police. Sophie decides she has no other choice but to trust Jess.

Nick is reeling with the news of his father’s death. They had a difficult relationship, but Jacques was still his father. Nick helps Jess get Ben down the stairs.

Ben is in recovery at the hospital. Though the doctors seemed skeptical of Jess’s story that he fell off his moped, they treated him without further questions. Ben confesses to Jess that he was attracted to the family because they had everything he didn’t, but that he also resented them for it. He apologizes for not having been there for her in the past. Theo visits, and Jess shares a plan for releasing Ben’s story without getting the undocumented women in the club deported.

Sophie receives a letter from Jess, who tells her that though Jess hasn’t gone to the police, Ben’s article will be published in two weeks. Depending on Sophie’s cooperation, she and Mimi can either be unnamed or take on starring roles. Mimi is away in the South of France to paint and rest. Nick has also left, but Antoine is still in the building, dealing with his father’s death. Jess’s letter proposes that Sophie sell off her jewelry, art, and wine, giving the proceeds to the trafficked women so they can get away before the news story brings the police to their doors. Sophie looks around her apartment. The concierge has slipped away, even with her injuries, and taken with her some of Sophie’s valuables and her dog, Benoit.

After Ben’s story is released weeks later, a news report reveals that Antoine has died by suicide and that an anonymous website has published the records and photographs of the club’s traffickers. The police are searching for Jacques, who remains at large. The investigation is made more difficult by the fact that all of the women at the club have disappeared.

Ben is staying in Paris to pursue his now-burgeoning career. Jess accepted a cut of Sophie’s pay-off money to rent a studio in Italy. At the train station, she notices the familiar gait of the concierge with a silver whippet resembling Benoit, boarding a train for the South of France.