The Hedgehog 2009

Paloma Josse, Garance Le Guillermic, is an 11-year-old girl living quietly and unhappily in a luxurious Paris apartment with her family. She is intelligent and observant, sensing the disappointment and despair that often lie behind adulthood, and she records telling moments in the lives of the imperfect people around her: her mother Solange Josse, Anne Brochet; her moody sister Colombe Josse, Sarah Le Picard; and the various dinner guests who drift through their home. As her twelfth birthday approaches—barely more than 165 days away—Paloma quietly contemplates ending her life, choosing to document the world she believes she must endure.

Renée Michel, Josiane Balasko, is the gruff-looking, reclusive concierge who runs the building where Paloma and her family live. She hides a passion for literature from her bourgeois employers, a secret that begins to surface when the new resident Kakuro Ozu, Togo Igawa, notices Renée’s bibliophile soul beneath her tough exterior. A connection forms between Renée and Kakuro, and they open up about their shared loves and the spouses they’ve lost. Crucially, they both begin to form a bond with Paloma, who starts spending time in Renée’s apartment when she longs to escape the noise and expectations of her family.

Paloma’s preparations for her planned exit from life lead her to take antidepressants from her mother, a heartbreaking sign of the girl’s waning hope. In a dramatic moment, she seems to cause the death of her sister’s goldfish by dosing it with one of the pills, only for Renée to discover the fish alive in her own toilet and to save it. As Paloma grows to respect Renée, she confesses a dream: she wants to become a concierge herself when she grows up.

A turning point arrives when Kakuro stops by to ask Renée on a date. Initially rebuffed because of Renée’s fragile self-image, she later changes her mind and agrees to go out. They share a warm evening at a restaurant, and Renée’s optimism about their future feels real. The next day, on Paloma’s twelfth birthday, the unthinkable happens: Renée is struck by a passing van and dies instantly, a loss that shocks Paloma to her core and briefly shakes her resolve to end her life. In the wake of this tragedy, Paloma makes a quiet but resolute decision to press pause on her plans.

In the aftermath, Kakuro eventually moves out of the building. Before he leaves, he passes Paloma both volumes of Anna Karenina, a gift he had previously given Renée. Paloma takes the books into her apartment along with the goldfish Renée had saved, a symbolic bridge between two lives that touched hers and a quiet reminder of the possibility of beauty and meaning even in a world she once believed to be irrevocably broken.