Anne is a theatre director. After her painful divorce, which took from her any hope she had to feel love again, she moves houses. Her new neighbour, Ben, is an unemployed actor, and is quite impressed with Anne from the beginning, but her wounds just feel too fresh. Things change when Anne decides to work on the staging of Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir, hiring Ben to play Coupeau and casting herself as Gervaise.
On and off stage, reality and fiction start to get mixed, and the couple seems to go step by step along the tragic story of Zola’s story until the very end.