Louise and Nina Dorval

Louise and Nina Dorval are linked by an investigation that becomes an attempted act of inhabitation. After Louise is found unconscious at the Massé apartment, Nina leads the inquiry into the children’s deaths; as Louise remains in a coma and others describe her as an exemplary nanny, Nina pursues the hidden sequence behind that public image. Her decision to play Louise during a reconstruction brings the two women into an uneasy relation: investigator and accused, interpreter and opaque subject, joined by gestures that Nina can repeat but cannot make fully transparent.

The investigator and the accused

Nina arrives at the Rue d’Hauteville apartment after Rose Grinberg’s telephone call identifying the nanny as the killer. Emergency workers are taking Mila to hospital, and Nina encounters the unconscious Louise upstairs, a small white ceramic knife still in her hand. She orders that Louise be removed through the back entrance, then enters the apartment and assigns roles to the officers investigating the scene. The evidence establishes their first connection as a starkly unequal one: Nina can direct the scene and its examination, while Louise cannot answer for herself.

The distinction remains central as the inquiry stretches over weeks. Louise does not emerge from her coma, and testimony about her is consistently favorable: she has been regarded as an irreproachable nanny. Rather than treating that reputation as an explanation, Nina searches for a failure in the story others tell. She is determined to understand what happened within the private world of childhood behind closed doors, a world whose intimacy is precisely what makes it difficult to investigate from outside.

Reconstructing Louise’s movements

Nina tests the accounts against Louise’s movements on the day of the crime. Wafa says that she came to the apartment in the morning and found Louise only partly opening the door. The children were still in their pajamas, watching television; Wafa proposed taking them out because the weather was fine, but Louise refused to let her in. Yet Rose Grinberg later places Louise in the building’s entrance hall, an hour before the murder and an hour before her usual nap. The discrepancy changes the inquiry from a question of what happened inside the apartment to one about where Louise went while she was away.

Police canvass the neighborhood, including a square, the Café Le Paradis, and the passages of Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, before locating supermarket surveillance footage. Nina watches it repeatedly. Louise moves quietly through the aisles, picking up milk, biscuits, and wine, while Adam and Mila run around her. Adam knocks items down and collides with a shopper; Mila reaches for chocolate eggs. Louise does not call after them or keep them in view. The children eventually return laughing and gather around her, but she barely responds. Nina reads the small signs of irritation in Louise’s contracted lip and oblique glance, and the footage offers a disturbing counter-image to the nanny’s reputation: proximity without visible attention, in a place where the children move freely beyond her apparent concern.

From ordinary care to the crime scene

The reconstruction narrows toward the afternoon’s familiar routines. Rose Grinberg closes her shutters at four; Wafa walks to the square and sits on a bench; Hervé finishes his shift. At that hour, Louise heads for the bathroom. Nina plans to repeat the sequence, including running the tap and testing the water with her hand as she had done when her own sons were small, before calling the children to bathe. The exercise makes care itself part of the evidentiary problem: a habitual gesture may be reproduced, but its ordinary meaning cannot settle what Louise intended that day.

Nina asks Paul whether the children usually enjoyed bathing or resisted undressing, and whether they might have been wary or surprised to take a bath at four in the afternoon. She considers whether an argument might have broken out. The weapon, too, connects the ordinary household to the crime: Paul identifies the small, extremely sharp ceramic knife as a Japanese gift from Thomas. Myriam had exchanged a one-euro coin for it, hoping to avert bad luck, and had stored it high in a cupboard because she did not use it and wanted it out of the children’s reach. Nina’s questions about the timing of the bath and the knife’s concealment attempt to recover not only what Louise did but the moment at which everyday domestic arrangements became lethal.

An archive that does not explain her

The investigation expands from the apartment to Louise’s past, without producing a stable account of her. Nina summons Bertrand Alizard, who is visibly afraid and stays in the corridor while police search Louise’s studio. They find empty drawers, immaculate windows, an old photograph of Stéphanie, and unopened envelopes. Nina also questions the Rouviers, M. Franck, Mme Perrin, doctors at Henri-Mondor Hospital, where Louise had been treated for mood disorders, and nannies from the square. She reads Louise’s flower-covered notebook and seeks out neighbors from the house in Bobigny. The people she interviews offer little beyond routine greetings; none seems to have known Louise closely.

That absence of knowledge becomes part of the relation between investigator and accused. Nina tries to break through the silence surrounding Louise by collecting testimony and reading the traces she left, but the materials do not combine into a clear portrait. Even the studio search, which might have supplied private evidence, yields almost nothing. The investigation gives Nina an expanding record of places, objects, and witnesses, while leaving Louise herself resistant to definition.

The re-enactment and its limits

In the hospital, Nina asks the nurse to leave her alone with Louise. The captain studies the unconscious woman’s bandaged neck and hands, her gray roots, and the faint pulse beneath her ear. She does not touch Louise, but sits beside her and speaks as though addressing a child pretending to sleep: “Je sais que tu m’entends.” The scene turns their connection into a one-sided encounter. Nina can address the accused, but Louise’s silence allows neither confirmation nor reply.

Nina believes a reconstruction can act as a revelation: on the staged scene, a detail may surface or a contradiction may become intelligible. The next morning she will return to the apartment on Rue d’Hauteville, still sealed since the May crime, and take Louise’s part. She imagines moving through the disorder—past the washing machine, the dirty sink, and the toys scattered under tables—until she repeats the physical circuit from bedroom to kitchen, bathroom to kitchen, rubbish bin to dryer, bed to hall cupboard, balcony to bathroom. In the imagined sequence, she will press her fingers into her ears against the children’s crying, reach into a cupboard for a knife, and drink wine by the open window on the small balcony.

The reconstruction is the closest Nina can come to Louise’s experience, but it also marks the boundary of her knowledge. Nina can reproduce movements and inspect the room where they occurred; she cannot make repetition equivalent to motive, or turn a silent, unconscious woman into a witness. Their relation therefore remains unresolved at the moment Nina prepares to perform it: the captain is both pursuing Louise and borrowing her body’s route through the apartment, hoping that the scene will disclose what the accumulated testimony and objects have not.