The second half of the film focuses on the duo's individual visits to 7 bis, rue du Nadir-aux-Pommes, the address of a mansion set in quiet, walled-off grounds in Paris.

Although seemingly empty and closed in the present day, the house is where Céline realises she knows as the place where she works as a nanny for a family—two jealous sisters, one widower, and a sickly child.

Soon, a repetitive pattern emerges: Céline or Julie enters the house, disappears for a time, and then is suddenly ejected by unseen hands back to present-day Paris later that same day.

At one point, they realise that the candy is a key to the other place and time; sucking on the sweet transports them back to the house's alternative reality (a double reference to both Lewis Carroll and Marcel Proust's madeleine) of the day's events.

Now, even as the plot continues to unfold in its clockwork fashion, the women begin to take control, making it "interactive" by altering their dialogues and inserting different actions into the events unravelling in the house.

The film ends as we watch Céline, half nodding off on a park bench, catch sight of Julie hurrying past her, who, in her White Rabbit way, drops her magic book.

At the start, the two women are leading relatively conventional lives, each having jobs (Julie, a librarian, is more conservative and sensible than Céline, a stage magician, with her bohemian lifestyle).

As the film develops, Céline and Julie separate from the world by leaving their jobs, moving in together, and gradually becoming obsessed with the mysterious and magical events in the old house.

[2] The film references Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Henry James' "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes", Bioy Casares' La invención de Morel,[3][4] and Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires (Gaumont, 1915).