The Strange OnesMovies like The Strange Ones
- Key Features:
- Psychological thriller, Dysfunctional family, Isolation, Jealousy, Malevolence, Secrets, Unreliable narrator, Coming-of-age, Small town, Relationship dynamics
- Tone:
- restrained, serious, suspense-driven
- Target Audience:
- Indie film enthusiasts, Psychological thriller fans, Character-driven drama viewers
- Emotional Arc:
- Intrigue → Unease
The Strange Ones

Elisabeth and her brother Paul live isolated from much of the world after Paul is injured in a snowball fight. As a coping mechanism, the two conjure up a hermetic dream of their own making. Their relationship, however, isn't exactly wholesome. Jealousy and a malevolent undercurrent intrude on their fantasy when Elisabeth invites the strange Agathe to stay with them -- and Paul is immediately attracted to her.
The Strange Ones
Mysterious events surround the travels of two brothers as they make their way across a remote American landscape. On the surface all seems normal, but what appears to be a simple vacation soon gives way to a dark and complex web of secrets. This is the feature film version of the 2011 short film going by the same name.

Alice and Louis are brother and sister. She is an actress; he was a teacher and poet. For more than 20 years, Alice has hated her brother. In all this time they haven’t seen one another. The death of their parents brings the siblings face to face.

Chloé, a fragile young woman, falls in love with her psychoanalyst, Paul. A few months later she moves in with him, but soon discovers that her lover is concealing a part of his identity.

When he inherits the family house and property after his mother's death, aspiring novelist Fane returns home with his bimbo girlfriend Lilas. He must care for his idiot brother Mo and contend with a greedy garage owner who covets Fane's property to expand his business. When efforts to buy the property are fruitless, the mechanic incites the townsfolk against the strange trio.

Mika, heiress to a Swiss chocolate company, is married to celebrated pianist André and stepmother to his son, Guillaume, whose mother died in a car wreck on his tenth birthday. Their lives are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Jeanne, a young woman who has learned she was almost switched with Guillaume at birth.

A writer must face the sudden death of his father, but after the burial, the latter reappears to him. He will have to learn to live with this facetious companion, but difficult to explain the situation to his family, because he is the only one who can see him. This disturbing presence will create an earthquake in the family.

A 19-year-old searches for her twin brother after he runs away from home, following a fight with their father.

Algiers, 1938. Meursault, a quiet and unassuming employee in his early thirties, attends his mother's funeral without shedding a tear. The next day, he begins a casual affair with Marie, a work colleague. He quickly slips back into his usual routine. However, his daily life is soon about to be disrupted by his neighbor, Raymond Sintès, who draws Meursault into his shady dealings. Until one blisteringly hot day, a tragic event occurs on a beach...

Matthieu is a 33 year old Parisian who finds out that the father he never knew has died and decides to go to his funeral in order to meet his two siblings in Quebec. But once in Montréal, he realizes that nobody is aware of his existence or even interested in it. He is alone, in hostile territory…

Nine-year-old Lisa discovers her sinister new friend is the ghost of the dead twin of Lisa's mother. Then Lisa's father also begins to suspect his wife of hiding a terrible secret, resulting in deadly consequences…

Two, very different, brothers are reunited for their father's funeral. But, when they arrive at the crematorium nobody is there, not even the corpse, except for Chloe who introduces herself as their sister.

Julien and Marguerite de Ravalet, son and daughter of the Lord of Tourlaville, have loved each other tenderly since childhood. But as they grow up, their affection veers toward voracious passion.

Two young brothers are abandoned by their mother during summer of 1948, they run into the forest and survive there for seven years.

Jérôme Varenne, a French financier, lives and works in Shanghai with Chen-Li, his life and business partner. One day, during a short stay in Paris, while paying a call to his mother, he is very displeased to learn from her and his hated brother, that the family house in Ambray is going to be sold. Jerome decides to go to the town where he grew up to see what is going on. Little does he know how eventful his escapade will be. Little does he know that it will change his life from soup to nuts...

Lucien, 14, can’t understand why his father, a serious and respected teacher, makes a fool of himself by dressing up as a clown and giving a show. André, Lucien’s father’s best friend, feels for the teenager and decides to reveal something from their mutual past that will explain the reason for Lucien’s father’s strange behavior.

Young and full of life, Murielle has a promising future ahead of her when she meets and falls head over heels for Mounir. A wedding soon follows, and the happy couple quickly set about preparing to make a family. However, with family come ties, and none come as tight as that between Mounir and his adoptive father. As Murielle continues to bring new life into the family, frictions between Mounir and Doctor Pinget reach boiling point. Helpless to extract her husband and children from the wealthy nest that Doctor Pinget has provided for them, Murielle is drawn into an unhealthy family dynamic. There is only one way out of this nightmare, and for Murielle all sense of reasoning begins to abandon her.

Forty-year-old Paul-André is a timid, rather introverted man. Rich but alone, he is deeply bored and ends up concluding that what he needs is a family. Violette, a forty-year-old full of energy, is threatened with eviction and is afraid she'll lose custody of her two children. Paul-André then proposes a totally above the board contract to rent the family in exchange for him paying off Violette's debts. For better and for worse..

Lola has two brothers: Benoit, who is getting married for the third time, and Pierre, who shows up late for the wedding. Excuses, reproaches, arguments, misunderstandings... beneath it all, they're just doing their best to live their own lives. Benoit is about to become a father, but he's not ready yet. Lola meets Zoher while she's still going through her divorce. Pierre's professional problems take a turn for the worse. Though everything in their lives seems to be pulling them apart, the three of them stick together - an inseparable trio.

Since her childhood, Jessica has been haunted by recurrent nightmares whose meaning escapes her. This peculiarity has led her to study the psychophysiology of dreams and to follow a therapy with Sean, her mentor and boyfriend, to try and understand the origin of her nightmares. Following the death of her maternal grandmother she hardly knew, Jessica reluctantly returns to the family home. Jessica then begins to wander in a nightmarish world inhabited by twisted versions of her family members. She gradually improves her skills as a lucid dreamer and investigates to solve the mystery that gnaws her and haunts the family home...

Husband does not understand his wife? Conflict with children? Do you want to be heard and stood in your place? Be afraid of your desires. In this family, everything changed places, including grandmother.

A playwright encounters a mysterious woman when he takes shelter in a chalet during a violent snowstorm and becomes obsessed with her.

Two young men seek the solitude of the country; their peace is disturbed when a set of random occurrences suggest to their susceptible minds a pattern with sinister meanings.

Felix and Martha, the two offspring of legendary serial murderer The Skinner of Mons, grapple with the grotesque legacy bequeathed to them. While Martha works a menial janitorial job, Felix continues his father's reign of terror. But following a brutal attack at work, Martha quickly descends into madness, finding she must come to terms with the infamous blood that flows through her veins.

A series of gruesome accidents plague a small American farming community in the summer of 1935, encircling two identical twin brothers and their family.

In a quiet fishing village on northern France's Opal Coast, the birth of a peculiar child sparks a hidden war between extraterrestrial forces of good and evil.

Rémi is a man trapped in a deteriorating marriage. When his wife is unexpectedly killed in a car accident, Rémi is left with his stepdaughter, Marion, who chooses to stay with him rather than live with her birth father. After the initial shock passes, Rémi is caught off-guard when Marion begins expressing her attraction to him. Initially repulsed, Marion's mature beauty wears him down as he finally caves to her seductions.

Two enigmatic women, Leni and Viva, separately arrive in Paris, each with a hidden but shared motive. As they navigate the city and their search progresses, various characters become entangled in their conflict, one which increasingly comes to take a fantastical turn. These characters too, driven by their own desires, strive to assert their influence in the struggle. In Paris, drenched in an otherworldly ambiance, an opaque tale of desire and power emerges through mystery and secrets.

When a teenager suddenly disappears without a trace, the case is assigned to an alcoholic police officer who maintains a complicated relationship with his own troubled teenage son, suspected of drug trafficking.

In order to escape the police after a robbery, two estranged siblings lay low in a metaphysical farmhouse that hides them away in a different time. There they reckon with a mysterious force that pushes their familial bonds to unnatural breaking points.

Five brothers similar yet different, raised by a mother widowed too early. One of them had left the family when he returns, pursued by a gang of smugglers, he find shelter in his family while reveling them a dark secret. The five brothers, together, will find the energy to defend themself and the means to avenge the memory of their murdered father...

The adventures of an upper-class suburban family abruptly confronted with the younger brother's discovery of his homosexuality, the elder sister's suicide attempt and sadomasochist tendencies, and the intrusion of a very free-spirited maid and her husband. And it all started with the arrival in the family of an innocent looking rat.

In 1930s France, two sisters who are thought to be able to communicate with ghosts meet a visionary producer while performing in Paris.

Sophia, a brilliant doctoral student, has always maintained a symbiotic relationship with her brother Karim. The arrival of a new lover in Karim’s life significantly alters their dynamic.

Agathe runs an art gallery. Her husband François is a publisher. Together they have one son, and in every way seem to be the picture of normality — but emotions are stewing under the surface. All it takes is the arrival of a complete stranger for things to start unravelling. Patrick is brash, uncouth and totally unselfconscious...

Marco returns to Paris after his brother-in-law's suicide, where he targets the man his sister believes caused the tragedy – though he is ill-prepared for her secrets as they quickly muddy the waters.

A reporter witnesses a brutal murder and becomes entangled in a mystery involving a pair of twins.

A young French Canadian, one of five boys in a conservative family in the 1960s and 1970s, struggles to reconcile his emerging identity with his father's values.

When Blanche meets Grégoire, she thinks she has found the one. The ties that bind them grow quickly, and a passionate affair ensues. Together, they relocate. For Blanche, far from her family, from her twin sister, Rose, a new life begins. But little by little, she finds herself caught in the grip of a deeply possessive and dangerous man.

The erotic novelist Taeko is writing a morbid story of a family destroyed by incest, murder and abuse. Her assistant, Yuji, sets on a mission to uncover the reality of this story, but the reality might be too much to bear.

A sister and brother face the realities of familial responsibility as they begin to care for their ailing father.

Miriam and Antoine have recently separated. While she’s willing to permit their 17-year-old daughter Josephine to decide living arrangements for herself, Miriam is desperate to keep her youngest, 11-year-old Julien, away from his father. But the magistrate rules in favour of joint custody, and suddenly the boy is thrown directly into the middle of an escalating parental conflict, where it seems inevitable that sides must be chosen.

Louise, a widow with two children, almost crushes a stranger with her car. She takes care of him, even if he's not really wounded. It turns out that he has mental disorders and that they can help each other much more than they thought.

A woman who survived the brutal killing of her family as a child is forced to confront the events of that day.

Mourning his brother's recent death, Pierrick accepts his best friend Tessa's invitation to stay in her family home — at last, a week alone. But when her gets there, he finds the house already occupied by Tessa's sister Marie.

Marion is about to divorce from her husband and takes her 15-year-old niece, Pauline, on a vacation to Granville. There, she meets an old love...

Three teenagers are confined to an isolated country estate that could very well be on another planet. The trio spend their days listening to endless homemade tapes that teach them a whole new vocabulary. Any word that comes from beyond their family abode is instantly assigned a new meaning. Hence 'the sea' refers to a large armchair and 'zombies' are little yellow flowers. Having invented a brother whom they claim to have ostracized for his disobedience, the uber-controlling parents terrorize their offspring into submission.

Alice arrives unannounced at her estranged brother Ethan's house in an attempt to reconcile, but bizarre visions, the return of his strange girlfriend and Alice's paranoia and suspicion force the siblings to cling onto reality amidst mysterious circumstances.

A peculiar neighbor offers hope to a recent widow who is struggling to raise a teenager who is unpredictable and, sometimes, violent.

When a gloomy, God-fearing island community is rocked by the assault of an infant, a psychiatrist is called in to examine Dorothy Mills, the teenager accused of the crime. Despite the villagers' hostility to her inquiry, she soon comes to suspect that Dorothy suffers from multiple personality disorder...

Three friends navigate mid-life crises: a blocked writer, a disillusioned doctor, and a charming man facing bankruptcy and divorce. As their struggles strain friendships, a younger man captures the attention of one friend's wife, complicating their lives further.

Young boxer Michel Maudet is sacked by his manager after a series of match defeats and is forced to look for a new job. He is engaged as secretary to a millionaire named Ferchaux who is in a hurry to flee the country when he discovers he has been implicated in a high-profile fraud.

Lea and her husband Marc have known Francis and his wife Karine for a very long time. Over the years, each one of them has been assigned a specific role. The balance and dynamic of the group is blown up when Lea decides to write a novel, which turns into an immediate bestseller…

Moussa has always been gentle, altruistic and present for his family. This is the opposite of his brother Ryad, a TV presenter of great notoriety who is reproached for his selfishness by his entourage. Only Moussa defends him, who has great admiration for his brother. One day Moussa falls and hits his head violently. He suffers a head injury. Unrecognizable, he now speaks without a filter and tells his relatives the truth. He ends up falling out with everyone except Ryad.

An experienced airline pilot, Estelle leads a perfect life between long-haul flights with her loving, protective husband Guillaume. One day, by chance, in an airport corridor, she crosses paths with Ana, a photographer with whom she had a passionate affair twenty years earlier. Little does Estelle know that this reunion will send her into a nightmarish spiral, turning her life upside down and irrational.

Camille, is the eldest of a large family. One day, her parents enter a religious community which gradually, regimentation becomes sectarian and Camille will have to fight to assert her freedom and save her brothers and sisters.

Forced to work extremely hard to keep things afloat, Paul begins hearing voices in his head questioning his past choices. Convinced that his wife has been unfaithful, he begins to see every male guest as a potential threat. What follows is Paul's downward spiral into the madness of deranged jealousy where he finally discovers that hell is not a state of mind – hell is himself.

A dockworker seeking revenge on the killer of his sister finds himself the object of desire for two women.

Pierre Perdrix has been enjoying an enchanted though restless existence since the enigmatic Juliette Webb burst into his life, a stranger who landed in his family's unique world like a meteorite, and who by her presence alone will force this tight-knit microcosm to redefie their boundaries and finally begin to fully live their lives.

When two siblings stumble on a strange hole in the wall of their grandparents' house, horrifying incidents reveal sinister secrets about their family.

Two neurotics, working for a suicide hotline on the night of Christmas Eve, get caught up in a catastrophe when a pregnant woman, her abusive boyfriend, and a transvestite visit their office.

When Charlotte, 27, meets her brother Henrik, 35, for the first time as an adult, it becomes an encounter without boundaries, between two people who don't know what a normal family is. How does sibling love manifest itself if you have never experienced it before? Homesick is an unusual family drama about seeking a family, and breaking every rule to be one.

Two couples, Pierre and Aimée, Éric and Pénélope, all share four years of friendship without cloud. Only concern, Penelope and Pierre have become lovers ... The situation becoming untenable, they decide to break. But after a final night of passionate love, fate plays a trick on them: Peter and Penelope each wake up in the body of the other! To protect their secrecy, they each find themselves having to live the life of the other. This is the beginning of the complications ...

When the Diallo family return home from their holiday, they find the locks have been changed and the new occupants maintain they are in "their home". With no one to turn to, patriarch Paul gets closer to Mickey, a shady local man with a penchant for all things extreme and illegal. Soon the once anti-violent teacher is approaching the point of no return…

A young woman's life spirals into chaos after she is involved in a hit-and-run accident. Then she encounters a mysterious man named Evian who offers her an opportunity for redemption. Narrated by a fish.

An upper middle-class French family celebrates a birthday in a restaurant. In one evening and during one meal, family history, tensions, collective and separate grudges, delights, and memories both clash and coalesce.

Gabrielle is a "statue" for tourists, much to the chagrin of her teenage son. Elsa is in angry at the world and desperate to become pregnant. Mao is a chronically depressed video game designer who drowns his melancholy in alcohol and psychoanalysis. They are brother and sisters but do not hang out. Ever. Their parents Pierre and Claudine, separated for a long time, have really done nothing to strengthen the bonds of the family - yet, at their grandfather's funeral, they are going to have to meet, and together answer the question: "What to do with grandma?"

Seemingly mild-mannered Henry Morrison has just murdered his entire family. After adopting a new identity and skipping town, he begins building a new relationship with a widow and her teenage daughter. However, he soon begins struggling to hide his true identity and maintain a grip on reality.

Making the most of the family home while her parents are away, 22-year-old Nicole is enjoying a peaceful summer with her best friend Véronique. But when Nicole’s older brother shows up with his band to record an album, the girls’ friendship is put to the test.

Pierre Hoffman joins a prestigious school as a substitute teacher and soon notices, among some of his students, an unjustified hostility and a spark of violence in their eyes. Is it because the unspeakable tragedy they have just experienced? Is it because they seem to be extraordinarily gifted children? Is it because they have lost all hope for the future? From curiosity to obsession, Pierre will try to unlock their secret.

As a heat wave brings a Marseille neighbourhood to the boil, three roommates gleefully meddle in the lives of their neighbours from their balcony. Until a late night drink turns into a bloody affair.

Michel, a murderous womanizer, meets introverted Gloria online and treats her to a whirlwind one-night-stand. Offering herself as an accomplice in his seductive crimes, the unhinged lovers embark on a deadly odyssey amplified by wild sex, unbridled jealousy, and passionate forays into the dark arts. This smart and gory shocker breathes new life into the lovesick horror genre to serve up a chilling tale of white-hot desperation and terrifying devotion.

In an isolated farmhouse, located in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by a mysterious wooden wall, Zac and Eva, two siblings gifted with extraordinary abilities, endure every day the wrath of their strict father while witnessing how a cruel sickness lurks their beloved mother.

After having resigned from his post as President of the Republic, Jeff and his family are happy to be back in their village of Bouzolles. As the end of the year holidays approach, Cathy asks for a unique gift: to reconnect with her sister Maguy, and her husband Jean-Yves, with whom Jeff has been angry for 10 years. The reconciliation could have gone smoothly, except that during a lunch, Jeff and Jean-Yves, will once again find a subject of contention: Christmas. This family feud, which should never have left Bouzolles, will turn into a standoff between Jeff and a giant of Internet distribution.

After the death of her husband, the mother of Julie, Jack, Sue and Tom begins to suffer from a mysterious illness. Aware that she is going to have to go into hospital she opens a bank account for the children, so that they can be financially self-sufficient and will be able to avoid being taken into care by the authorities. Unfortunately she also dies and Julie and Jack (the older, teenage children) decide to hide her body in the basement so that they can have free reign of their household. Soon Tom has taken to dressing as a girl whilst Sue has become increasingly reticent, confiding only to her diary, meanwhile Jack and Julie sense an attraction developing for each other. However Julie's new beau, Derek, threatens to unearth the many dark secrets within this family as he becomes increasingly suspicious of Jack.

Inquisitive journalist Grace Collier is horrified when she witnesses her neighbor, fashion model Danielle Breton, violently murder a man. Panicking, she calls the police. But when the detective arrives at the scene and finds nothing amiss, Grace is forced to take matters into her own hands. Her first move is to recruit private investigator Joseph Larch, who helps her to uncover a secret about Danielle's past that has them both seeing double.

Alice is a withdrawn 12-year-old who lives with her mother and her younger sister, Karen, who gets most of the attention from her mother, leaving Alice out of the spotlight. When Karen is found brutally murdered in a church, suspicions start to turn toward Alice. But could a 12-year-old girl really be capable of such savagery?

A gangster escapes jail and quickly makes plans to continue his criminal ways elsewhere, but a determined inspector is closing in.

Failed musician Jay abandoned his family and now earns a living as head bartender in a trendy London pub. Every Wednesday afternoon, a woman comes to his house for graphic, almost wordless, sex. One day, Jay follows her and learns about her. This eventually disrupts their relationship.

A woman with a metal plate in her head from a childhood car accident embarks on a bizarre journey, bringing her into contact with a firefighter who's reunited with his missing son after 10 years.

Pierre and Manon are poor. They make documentaries with nothing and they live by doing odd jobs. Pierre meets a young intern, Elisabeth, and she becomes his mistress. But Pierre will not leave Manon for Elisabeth; he wants to keep both.

Mort Rainey, a writer just emerging from a painful divorce with his ex-wife, is stalked at his remote lake house by a psychotic stranger and would-be scribe who claims Rainey swiped his best story idea. But as Rainey endeavors to prove his innocence, he begins to question his own sanity.

When Edward’s search for his biological family leads him and his girlfriend Ryley to a magnificent villa high in the mountains of Northern Portugal, he is full of excitement at meeting his long-lost mother and twin brother. Finally, he will discover who he is and where he comes from. But nothing is as it seems, and Edward will soon learn that he is linked to them by a monstrous secret.

Julie, a daydreaming librarian, meets Céline, an enigmatic magician, and together they become the heroines of a time-warping adventure involving a haunted house, psychotropic candy, and a murder-mystery melodrama.

Alain and Marie moved to the suburb house of their dreams. But the real estate agent warned them: what is in the basement may well change their lives forever.

Down a seedy city street in her neighborhood, young Enola Penny is obsessed with what appears to be a long abandoned theatre. One night, she sees that the front door is slightly ajar and impulsively decides to sneak inside. But there in the dark, decrepit auditorium, a show unlike any other unfolds before her eyes. Its host is an eerie human puppet named Peg Poett who will introduce Penny to six tales of the bizarre: A couple traveling in a remote part of the French Pyrenees cross paths with a lustful witch; A paranoid lover faces the wrath of a partner who has been pushed to her limit; The Freudian dreams of an unfaithful husband blur the lines between fantasy and reality; The horrors of the real world are interpreted through the mind of a child; A woman addicted to other people's memories gets her fix through the vitreous fluid of her victims' eyeballs; And a perverse obsession with sweets turns sour for a couple in too deep.

Elderly woman Berthe leaves her house to live with her daughter Emilie. Emilie and her brother Antoine had a falling out three years ago and have not seen each other since, but Emilie invites him for Christmas. Memories will resurface and impact both Berthe's destiny and the strange relationship between Emilie and Antoine.

Young provincial Charles arrives in Paris to stay with his cousin Paul while studying law. Paul is a decadent, bohemian pleasure-seeker who shows the meek, diligent Charles the thrills of city life. When Charles falls for Florence, one of Paul's acquaintances, relationships begin to shift.

A young man and his three younger siblings are plagued by a sinister presence in the sprawling manor in which they live.

Rémy and Mélanie live next door to each other in Paris but have never met. The two thirty-year-old Parisians search for connections online, but never have much success. Falling deeper into loneliness and depression, both decide to start attending regular therapy. With the help of their therapists, they uncover the real roots of their issues, and find that the connection they were both searching for is much closer than they thought.

Marie, who works as a successful door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson, has been married to her husband Francois for 12 years and has a two-year-old son. Though she is relatively content with her life, she feels something is wanting. Enter 50-year old African-American Bill. Initially she is annoyed by his insouciance, but she finds that she is irresistibly attracted to him. Soon the two are in the midst of sordid illicit affair. She knows little about her new lover, and he seems uninterested in learning about her, but the long sessions of lovemaking are something else entirely. Feeling out of control, Marie is increasingly repelled by her own actions. Psychologically, she struggles to reconcile her torrid encounters with Bill and mundane domestic chores such as bathing her son. Moreover, she finds herself incapable of hiding her adulterous behavior, rather she comes home with scratches and hickeys all over her body, to the devastation Francois.

As young French couple Gilles and Marion officially separate, we see, in reverse order, the milestone moments in their relationship: Gilles revealing his unfaithfulness at a tense dinner party; Marion giving birth to their premature son while Gilles is elsewhere; Gilles and Marion's joyous wedding; and, finally, the fateful moment when they meet as acquaintances at an Italian beach resort, and their love affair begins.

The relationship between a middle-aged French widow and a young drifter takes a turn when her young niece pays a visit.

The mind of Pierre Bérard, a successful middle-aged architect, is torn between his unstable present with Hélène, his younger lover, and his happy memories of the past with Catherine, his ex-wife; but his true destiny awaits him at a crossroads on his way to Rennes…

Since Charlie is no longer there, the lives of Boris, Elie, and Maxime have been torn apart. These three men, who have nothing in common, all shared one thing: their love for Charlie. One loved her like a sister, one loved her like the woman of his dreams, one loved her like a friend. Except that Charlie is dead and none of them - not Boris, an accomplished businessman, not Elie, a night owl scriptwriter, and not Maxime, still living at home with his mother - know how to deal with it. But because she asked them to do so, they abruptly decide to undertake a journey together, heading for Corsica and the house that Charlie loved so much. Except that here they are stuck in a car together for over 500 miles. It's going to be a long journey. Boris, Elie and Maxime, three men, three generations, no affinity. But by the time they arrive at their destination, they will have realized one majorly important thing: Charlie has changed their lives forever.

In 1953, a sensitive French boy finds out from a neighbor that his family's Jewish. François Grimbert becomes a physician, and gradually peels the layers of his buried family history which resulted in his difficult upbringing, raised as Catholic by his "Aryan" appearing parents. His athletic father labored to stamp out stereotypical Jewish characteristics he perceived in his son, to keep the family's many secrets, as most relatives fought in World War II, and later were hauled off to labor and death camps by the Gestapo.

When their regal matriarch falls ill, the troubled Vuillard family come together for a hesitant Christmastime reunion. Among them is rebellious ne'er-do-well Henri and the uptight Elizabeth. Together under the same roof for the first time in many years, their intricate, long denied resentments and yearnings emerge again.

Island of La Réunion, in the beginning of the 20th century. Five teenagers commit a savage crime. As punishment, a Dutch captain takes them to a supernatural island with luxuriant vegetation and bewitching powers.


