Hell Train is a French film based on a true story. One evening at a ball in a small town, a fight breaks out in an atmosphere tinged with racism. Three of the ringleaders end up at the police station. The next day, November 14, 1983, on the Bordeaux-Ventimiglia train, the three men who were candidates for enlistment in the Foreign Legion beat Habib Grimzi, a 26-year-old Algerian, before throwing him out of a window. A young woman, who witnessed the murder, alerted the police. The investigation begins in a climate of extreme tension. In the city, provocations and attacks are increasing...

Juillet is a young orphan girl who returns to the town she was born in to find her mother. She tries to befriend her yuppie neighbors Marie and Jacques with comic consequences. The thrilling part (supposedly) of the film finds Marbas as a timid psycho killer who targets pretty young women.

The movie starts with an interview with director Claude Lelouch. He pleads viewers not to disclose the plot of the movie after leaving the projection room. Even the movie's trailer shows only a long sequence of faces gazing speechlessly in space. "Like all my movies, this one is about a man and a woman", says Lelouch in the interview.

After he's implicated in several murders, a real estate agent goes on the lam while his intrepid secretary does some private investigating of her own to locate the killer.