In the dilapidated Parisian suburbs, a down-onhis-luck door-to-door salesman (Patrick Dewaere, Themroc) is appalled when a potential customer casually pimps out her teenage niece (Marie Trintingant) to him in exchange for a dressing gown. Enraged, he becomes determined to set the girl free by any means necessary, providing a catalyst for a spiral of escalating violence, robbery, and murder. Serie Noire, co-written by Corneau and novelist Georges Perec and based on Jim Thompson's novel A Hell of a Woman, is regarded as possibly the best screen realisation of Thompson's uniquely bleak and gruesomely comic noir aesthetic, powered by an infamously physical and committed lead performance from Dewaere.