The Paris Apartment

Watching the Halloween party guests enter the building reminds the concierge of her daughter, who moved to Paris to be a dancer. She recalls speaking to Ben about her daughter, a delight because no one ever asks her about her family. The concierge is anxious about so many young people coming into the building after everything that’s happened there.

The Halloween party begins in the courtyard. Wondering if one of the partygoers might have known Ben, Jess puts a sheet over her head as a costume and joins the party.

Nick has taken up smoking again. He frets over having almost kissed Jess on Sophie’s patio earlier in the evening. He knows he hasn’t told her the entire truth about himself, but he doesn’t believe he’s lied to her.

He remembers bringing Ben over to his father’s apartment and feeling jealous that his father, Jacques, liked Ben right away. Later, Antoine confronted Nick for bringing around someone who could steal their father’s favor so easily. Nick also regretted it; Ben had mentioned their summer Euro-trip, and Nick was eager to forget about what happened in Amsterdam.

Nick enjoys keeping the whole truth from Jess because he is eager to disappear into the version of himself that he presents to her.

At the party, Jess loses her sheet and reveals herself to Camille. Camille is happy to see her at the party and mentions that Ben would have loved to be there too. When Jess asks about Ben’s relationship with the Meunier family, Camille insists that Ben and Dominique only flirted and that, while Antoine hated Ben, Jacques really liked him. Camille dodges questions about the night Ben disappeared.

At the Halloween party, Camille’s cool and attractive friends surround Mimi. A song by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs starts playing, reminding Mimi of Ben.

After Ben gave her an album by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Mimi tried to emulate the style of the lead singer and invited Camille to accompany her to a bar where Mimi knew Ben would be working on a story. On their way out, Mimi’s father saw her outfit and called her a “slut.” Still, she and Camille went to the bar and ran into some of Camille’s friends, who were using drugs. Mimi tried the drugs and, thrilled by their sparkling effect, lost herself in the music. When Ben appeared and helped her find a quiet spot away to take a breath, Mimi confided that she’d never had sex and that her father was cruel to her. Ben encouraged Mimi to harness her pain and use it for her art. Mimi kissed Ben, but Ben stopped and said their friendship meant too much to him. Mimi realized she was in love with Ben.

Now, at the Halloween party in the cellar, Mimi is anxious to see Jess in attendance.

Jess meets another party guest; the young man doesn’t know Ben but is surprised that Jess knows Mimi, who has few friends and has a reputation for emotional instability. Jess wants to get into Mimi’s apartment because she knows it currently must be empty. She convinces the young man to fetch the key from Camille on the pretense that she’ll use the bathroom.

In Mimi’s room, Jess finds a portrait, cut into pieces and covered by Ben’s t-shirt. Jess puts the pieces together and discovers that Mimi has been painting nude portraits of Ben and removing the eyes. She hears the man from the party calling out to her from the hallway. As she leaves Mimi’s bedroom, she feels ill. She asks the man what he put in her drink, then passes out.

The morning after the party, Mimi wakes up anxious and heads down to the cellar. Among the littered Halloween decorations, sees Ben’s Vespa and recalls the time she made a small hole in his tire so he’d have to walk to work and she could follow him. She followed him to a café, where he met up with a beautiful brunette model, but she was relieved that he kept his distance from the young woman and didn’t touch her. Mimi was certain Ben was faithful to herself. She had been in love before, with an art teacher whom she painted portraits of. That had ended in a formal complaint, and the teacher and his wife had moved abroad after Mimi cut up the portraits and sent them to his wife. Mimi believes that what differentiates her from Camille is passion—Mimi needs to feel deeply in love in order to want sex.

Mimi’s own bike is in the cellar, and she takes it into the street, where she is promptly cut off by a van and falls on the tarmac. The concierge runs out to help her as Mimi and the driver curse at one another. Mimi is disappointed that she wasn’t committed enough to let the van hit her as she had intended.

The day Sophie received the extortionist’s third note, she uncharacteristically went out to a restaurant to eat steak. As she ate, she recalled trying to get pregnant, when the doctor had encouraged her to eat red meat. Though Jacques already had two sons (Antoine and Nick) from a previous marriage, he had aggressively pressured Sophie to become pregnant and wouldn’t entertain adoption. At the restaurant, she was annoyed to run into Ben, who sat down with her without invitation. He offered to write a lifestyle piece on Sophie and her glamorous life, but Sophie rejected the offer, preferring to keep her life private. After Ben left, Sophie drank a bottle of wine, fuming over his impertinence and the threatening notes. She later knocked on Ben’s door and confronted him about the extortion, but Ben settled her down on the sofa and assured her he had no idea what she was talking about. They kissed, tentatively at first, and then had sex.

After waking up stressed and disoriented, Nick takes some pills to relax while he thinks back on Ben.

In Amsterdam, after Nick told Ben about his father’s perverse birthday gift, the two of them kissed. Nick had never kissed a boy before, but kissing Ben felt natural. He then performed oral sex on Ben in a deserted alley, and though Nick immediately regretted it, Ben shrugged it off. When Ben emailed him 10 years later, it seemed like a sign—but after Ben moved into the apartment and connected with Nick’s family, he stopped answering Nick’s phone calls or spending time with him. Nick felt used. He also felt nervous about all the secrets Ben knew about him. He decided he needed to get Ben to leave.

Jess wakes up late in the day, groggy and hungover in Ben’s bed. She remembers that Victor, the man from the party, didn’t rape her as she had feared before passing out. In fact, Victor seemed frightened by her drugged state, and he was the one who brought her safely to Ben’s apartment. She also recalls finding the cut pieces of Mimi’s paintings of Ben. Theo calls and tells her they need to meet because he’s figured out what the metal card in Ben’s wallet means.

It was Mimi who spiked Jess’s drink—with ketamine. Camille wakes up and asks if Mimi’s been up all night with a man. Two weeks earlier, they went lingerie shopping together; they each said they had a particular man in mind, but both were secretive about who that man was. Camille brought Mimi to a sex shop to buy a vibrator and encouraged Mimi to masturbate and get in touch with her sexuality. For the next few nights, Mimi continued to watch Ben through the windows as he wrote furiously through the night.

Antoine barges into Nick’s apartment and claims that his wife, Dominique, had an affair with Ben. Antoine blames Nick for bringing Ben into their lives and insinuates that Nick has a crush on Ben. Nick lunges at Antoine but quickly stops and apologizes; he recognizes that his brother’s alcoholism exacerbates his erratic behavior, but Nick is protective over him and knows that he himself has addictions to oxycodone and exercise. Still angry, Antoine mocks Nick for fleeing his investor life in California to return to Paris for the privilege of his father’s money. He then proposes coming up with a way to get rid of Jess, but Nick insists that anything they do will only chase her to the police. Nick has recently been in touch with his father, who has put him in charge while he’s away.

The narrative briefly flashes back to three days earlier: The concierge watches as a body is carried out of the building in a shroud. She decides to keep it secret and notices Mimi watching the scene from her apartment window.

On her way out of the apartment to meet Theo, Jess sees the butt of a cigarette smoking in the darkness. She turns on the light, but no one is there. As she leaves the building, the concierge stops her and brings her into the concierge’s cabin. She tells Jess to stop looking for Ben, that she’s been trying to help Jess this whole time, and that there’s nothing for Jess here. She tells Jess to leave.

Mimi knocks on Sophie’s door and tells her she’s frightened. Sophie holds her daughter, the person she loves most. Sophie gets momentarily lost in thought, thinking back on how her sexual encounter with Ben turned into a reckless affair. As she holds Mimi now, Sophie reaffirms her desire to make sure nothing gets in the way of Mimi’s safety. Sophie adopted her when Mimi was a baby, and she had the birth record falsified so that no one would know Mimi wasn’t her biological daughter.

Jess meets Theo at the metro station. He passes her a new outfit to wear because their destination has a strict dress code. After Jess changes clothing, Theo brings her to a quiet alley and knocks at an unmarked door. When the door opens, he flashes the metal card. They’re granted entrance and given masks to wear.

Jess and Theo are ushered into a basement bar, decorated lavishly. Though everyone looks wealthy, Jess senses something is off. Theo pretends Jess is his wife as they order drinks, and he reveals that the bar is owned by the Meuniers. The lights dim and curtains open, revealing scantily clothed women dancing in a way that disturbs Jess. Theo tells her the bar is called “La Petite Mort,” French for “the little death.” It’s an exclusive club, with entry granted only by such a card as the one from Ben’s wallet. Many masked men are going through the bar to enter a separate room. A nearly naked woman performs on a hoop descending from the ceiling—and both she and Jess are shocked to recognize each other: It’s the same woman who followed Jess on the street and asked about Ben.

Nick, Antoine, and Mimi all gather in Sophie’s apartment while Sophie tries to ignore her vivid sexual memories of Ben. They begin their meeting.