Eccentric door-to-door salesman Franck Poupart meets teenager Mona, who is being forced into sex work by her miserly aunt. When Franck’s wife leaves him and he loses his job, Mona convinces him to rob her aunt, and he soon realizes how bad his luck can get.

In a mercurial performance of cyclonic exasperation, Patrick Dewaere barrels through the wintry suburbs of Paris as a self-made patsy in a murderous muddle. A desolately funny, Dostoyevskian thriller from Alain Corneau, Série noire plots a fatalistic course into the depths of crime and punishment.