Henri Verdoux had been a bank teller for 30 years before being laid off. To support his disabled wife and his child, he begins marrying and murdering wealthy widows. The Couvais family becomes suspicious when Thelma Couvais withdraws all her money and disappears two weeks after marrying a man named Varnay, whom they only know through a photograph.
Verdoux tries to woo Marie Grosnay, but she refuses. Over the following weeks, Verdoux has a flower girl repeatedly send Grosnay flowers. In urgent need of money to invest, Verdoux, now posing as M. Floray, visits Lydia Floray, one of his previous victims and convinces her the financial crisis is imminent so she takes her savings out of the bank. The following night, Verdoux murders her and takes the money.
At a dinner party with his real wife, Verdoux asks a friend of theirs, a chemist, about the drug he developed to exterminate animals painlessly. The chemist explains the formula and that he had to stop working on it after the local pharmaceutical board banned it, so Verdoux attempts to recreate the drug.
Shortly thereafter, Verdoux finds a girl taking shelter from the rain in a doorway and takes her in. When he finds she was just released from prison and has nowhere to go, he prepares dinner for her with wine laced with his newly developed poison. Before drinking the wine, she thanks him for his kindness, and starts to talk about her crippled husband who died while she was in jail. Verdoux decides to spare her and replaces her drugged drink with a glass of unpoisoned wine.
Spoken languages: English
Subtitles: Danish,Swedish,Norwegian,Finnish
