Based on Douglas Kennedy’s best-selling international thriller, THE WOMAN IN THE FIFTH follows American novelist Tom Ricks (Academy Award® nominee Ethan Hawke, Before Sunset, Training Day) as he arrives in Paris determined to renew a relationship with his estranged wife and daughter.
When the longed-for meeting goes poorly, he ends up in a seedy hostel on the outskirts of the city. Unable to pay for his room and board, he agrees to work as a night guard at a warehouse for the proprietor (Samir Guesmi, Tell No One) and spends the hours writing elaborate, imaginative letters to his daughter.
One evening, after he’s invited to a literary gathering, Tom meets Margit (Academy Award® nominee Kristin Scott Thomas, The English Patient), an enigmatic translator whose magnetic presence and worldly manner intrigue the down-and-out author. She seduces him, haughtily dictating the time and place of their rendezvous in the Fifth Arrondissement. Their passionate affair coincides with a string of inexplicable events, and slowly Tom’s anxieties and inner torments begin to derange his sense of what’s real.