[4] Hire (originally Hirovitch) is an isolated bachelor who works as a tailor, with no human contact outside his job beyond occasional visits to a brothel, a skating rink and a bowling alley.

One evening the dead body of a young woman is found nearby and, watching his neighbour, Hire sees her boyfriend Émile, a petty criminal, trying to wash blood off his raincoat and hiding a handbag.

A British reviewer from the 1989 Mystfest in Cattolica described the film as a "quiet adaptation of the Simenon novel... a coolly detached look at a man's sexual obsession which also managed to be poignantly affecting".

[5] The reviewer of Time Out commented that Leconte focussed on "the unexpectedly tender relationship that develops between watcher and watched", rather than the murder mystery, and manipulates "audience sympathies to create a poignant study of amour fou".

"[9] Entertainment Weekly remarked that the plot "is involving in a conventional way, yet it isn’t tricky enough to work on the mystery-thriller level", but "Blanc’s sad, severe performance holds you, and Sandrine Bonnaire... makes the tenderest of femmes fatales.

But it is Leconte's direction that steals the show", and noted that "subtlety rather than suspense, slowly but surely piecing together a jigsaw of brief elliptical scenes which mirror the nervy hesitancy of Hire's emotions" marked the directorial style, and his "narrative economy contrives to say a great deal about his hapless protagonist.