In the 1950s, a psychiatric hospital in a windswept place deep in the countryside fuels countless rumours among residents of nearby villages. When the mutilated body of a child is found in the asylum courtyard, this does not seem to particularly interest the director, the psychiatrist, or even the local gendarmes.

But the arrival of Lucie, a young student of the eminent psychoanalyst Lacan, does attract much attention. She has come to study a patient suffering from prosopagnosia, a disorder that leaves sufferers unable to recognize faces, who may be able to help her find the perpetrator of a grisly murder on the Rue des Martyrs in Paris. But the chief psychiatrist, a brute of a man, is as hostile to Lucie’s inquiries as he is to the methods of psychoanalysis.

Lucie has no idea how dangerous snooping around the asylum will prove to be. What lurks there goes beyond all imaginable horrors, even those of the Massacre of the Rue des Martyrs.