Eight women gather to celebrate Christmas in a snowbound cottage, only to find the family patriarch dead with a knife in his back. Trapped in the house, every woman becomes a suspect, each having her own motive and secret.
Like every weekend senator Henri Pagès and his wife entertain guests at their beautiful mansion in a peaceful village near Paris. But this time around, things go awry: Pierre Collier, a psychoanalyst and consummate womanizer, is brutally murdered. Claire, his wife, dazed and confused by his corpse, with a smoking gun still in her hand, seems to be the ideal culprit...
Mike Kendall, a disgraced ex-cop, is fighting a losing battle with the bottle. When he finds a woman left for dead at the side of a road, Kendall turns private eye to track down her killers, taking one last shot at redemption.
A woman framed for her husband's murder suspects he is still alive; as she has already been tried for the crime, she can't be re-prosecuted if she finds and kills him.
A lawyer is asked to come to the police station to clear up a few loose ends in his witness report of a foul murder. "This will only take ten minutes", they say, but it turns out to be one loose end after another, and the ten minutes he is away from his speech become longer and longer.
Two cops, Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett), are called to investigate the homicide of ambitious silver screen B-lister Betty Ann Short (Mia Kirshner), A.K.A. "The Black Dahlia"-an attack so grisly that images of the killing were kept from the public.
While Blanchard's growing preoccupation with the sensational murder threatens his marriage to Kay (Scarlett Johansson), his partner Bleichert finds himself attracted to the enigmatic Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank), the daughter of one of the city's most prominent families--who just happens to have an unsavory connection to the murder victim.
Based on the best-selling crime novel by James Ellroy.
Cast: Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, Mia Kirshner
Directed by Brian De Palma