[citation needed] The story centres on young university student Anne who, through her older brother, meets a group of people haunted by mysterious tensions and fears and the deaths of two of its members.

The source of the malaise affecting the group is never explained, leaving viewers to wonder how far it might be an amalgam of individual imbalances, general existentialist anxiety, or the paranoia of the Cold War as the world faced the possibility of nuclear annihilation.

Philip, an unsteady American refugee from McCarthyism, gets drunk and later slaps a smartly dressed woman named Terry, accusing her of causing Juan's death by breaking up with him.

[6] Richard Brody of The New Yorker reviewed the film positively: "Rivette’s tightly wound images turn the ornate architecture of Paris into a labyrinth of intimate entanglements and apocalyptic menace; he evokes the fearsome mysteries beneath the surface of life and the enticing illusions that its masterminds, whether human or divine, create.

If the first work of a long career should, at least in the oeuvre-charting rear-vision mirror, offer an appropriately characteristic or even perhaps idiosyncratic entry point into a distinct film-world, then Paris nous appartient is indeed a perfect 'first' Rivette in its combination of formal daring and conceptual elusiveness.