Paris in the 1880s. Georges Duroy (Robert Pattinson) is a penniless soldier who has spent the last six months in Paris, barely making a living as an office clerk. At a club he meets an old friend, Charles Forestier (Philip Glenister), with whom he spent three years in the war in Algeria. The friend is well off and invites him to his home where he meets Mrs. Madeleine Forestier (Uma Thurman) and her friends Clotilde de Marelle (Christina Ricci) and Virginie Rousset (Kristin Scott Thomas). Mrs. Rousset's husband is an editor of the conservative newspaper La Vie Française and she helps him to get a job there, initially by publishing his diaries from the war in the paper. Step by step he finds ways improve his social and financial status. He uses his wit and powers of seduction to charm wealthy women, and as he goes from nothing to money all hell breaks loose and things happen and end up looking bad for him.
As he goes along with what he has in mind to do, tragedy sets in when all the things that have happened with him and his friends' wives end up crashing down and he ends up in lot of sticky situations.
