A beautiful, drunken, and promiscuous girl (Marie Trintignant) ends a disastrous evening at The Hole, a bar catering to the twisted and outcast. There she meets the recently widowed Laure (Stéphane Audran), an elegant retiree who lives alone in a luxury hotel. Laure takes Betty under her wing. Gradually, details of Betty's sad, sordid and, at times, sinister story of betrayal and self-destruction unfold in flashbacks as the women's relationship evolves into a lethal game of cat-and-mouse.
Adapted from the novel by Georges Simenon, Betty shares many of the themes that made Chabrol's superb Les Biches (1968, starring Audran and Jean-Lous Trintignant) so erotically suspenseful...and Hitchcockian: The exchange of identity and guilt between two women of different ages, both in love with the same man.
