Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung plays a fictionalised version of herself, as disasters result when an unstable French film director (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) attempts to remake Louis Feuillade's classic silent film serial Les Vampires (1915–16).

Maggie Cheung has been cast to play the film's heroine, Irma Vep, a burglar and a spy, who dresses in a tight, black, latex rubber catsuit.

Later that evening, Maggie, apparently possessed by her character, dons the catsuit and steals jewelry from a hotel suite while a nude woman argues on the phone with her boyfriend.

According to Chris Darke, it is not a "mourning for cinema with the romantic nostalgia" but "more like the Mexican Day of the Dead: remembrance as an act of celebration".

"[4] The idea for the film was born out of an attempted collaboration among Assayas, Claire Denis, and Atom Egoyan, who wanted to experiment with the situation of a foreigner in Paris.

[citation needed] In the 1915 original serial, written and directed by Louis Feuillade, Irma Vep was played by French silent film actress Musidora (1889–1957).

However, Assayas publicly stated that although he considers La nuit americaine a great film, it is more about the fantasy of filmmaking than the reality.

The website's critics consensus reads, "Starring a bewitching Maggie Cheung, Irma Vep is an evocative and reflexive satire of the filmmaking process that is bursting at the seams with an affection for cinema.

A character in the five-comic series "Anno Dracula – 1895: Seven Days in Mayhem" by Kim Newman and Paul McCaffrey is based on Irma Vep.

It stars Alicia Vikander, Vincent Macaigne, Adria Arjona, Byron Bowers, Devon Ross, Carrie Brownstein, Tom Sturridge and Fala Chen and was written and directed by Assayas.