A museum plinth sits under a spotlight, the glass case open, and the enormous blue stone that should be on it is gone. In its place someone has propped a red card. On that card is a little black and white roundel of a man in a top hat and monocle, the oldest gentleman-thief shorthand there is. Around the roundel, stuck on at angles, are a glitter star, a rainbow heart and two more stars, the kind of stickers that come on a sheet in a child’s bedroom. That single frame is the whole pitch of “Lupin” Part 4, whose trailer Netflix put out on 14 September. It lands somewhere between a threat and a party invitation.
Part 4 arrives on Friday 23 October, eight episodes of roughly 45 minutes, and it picks up four years after Part 3 left off. Assane Diop (Omar Sy) is in prison, and by Netflix’s own synopsis he intends to stay there. He wants to serve the sentence out and keep a promise he made to his son about going to meet their family in Senegal. Then an announcement signed “Lupin” goes public, several museums are hit at once, and the man in the cell is the obvious suspect for crimes he could not physically have committed. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “Lupin” Part 4 trailer, including the theft that opens it, the object that gets stolen and what the trailer implies about who is doing the stealing.
Around the roundel, stuck on at angles, are a glitter star, a rainbow heart and two more stars, the kind of stickers that come on a sheet in a child’s bedroom.”
The two and a half minutes open in custody, on a corridor, on a man in prison-issue cream being walked somewhere. Somewhere off camera, voices start shouting the name. “Lupin!” It keeps coming, over a shot of a gallery floor at night with a glass vitrine tipped onto it and officers moving through the frame. Then two lines land on top of each other: “Where is he?” and “Find him!” The cut that answers them is Assane’s face in close-up, lit hard from one side, saying the two things that set the season running. “It wasn’t me!” And then, quieter: “I was framed.”
What was taken is worth pausing on, because the production did not invent it. The plinth card reads “Grand Saphir de Louis XIV,” and underneath, “Cristal de 135,8 ct.” That is a real object in a real Paris collection. The Grand Sapphire weighs 135.74 carats and came out of Sri Lanka, and it was inventoried by the royal treasurer on 1 July 1669 before being set in gold three years later. It has lived at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle since 1796 under inventory number A.67. Today it sits in the permanent Trésors de la Terre display. The show rounded 135.74 up to 135,8 on the card, which is the sort of liberty nobody will notice.
Here is the part that makes the choice a good one rather than merely an expensive one. That sapphire has actually been stolen. It went missing in 1792, in the looting of the French crown jewels during the Revolution. It turns up again on an inventory dated 23 December that same year, so it was recovered inside a few months. A series about a thief who takes his whole identity from a fictional character has picked, for its opening heist, a stone with a genuine theft and a genuine recovery already in its file. Whether the show knows that or simply liked the look of the thing is not something the trailer tells you, but it is a good joke either way.
There is a second museum in the cut too, and it is enormous: a hall of iron columns and glass roofing, an elephant standing on the floor, specimens strung up in the air above it, and a figure in dark clothes swinging clean across the whole space on a line. Netflix’s synopsis promises several museums hit at once, and the trailer is plainly not confining itself to one building. From there it moves outward into how Paris reacts, which is mostly by being delighted. Digital advertising panels on a station concourse carry a distorted red image, and a phone screen shows the same face rendered in blue and red beside a document. A voice supplies the framing: “We have a new Lupin.” Someone else adds the detail that matters most, calling the culprit “a little hacking genius.” Then Benjamin Ferel (Antoine Gouy) and Assane are in an atelier together, trading the line the marketing has clearly fallen in love with. “We’re dealing with a copycat.” “Pretty flattering.” A beat later Assane closes it out: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”
The back half turns from flattered to hunted. “Whoever you are, I’ll find you,” Assane says over rooftops, an escalator and a lit facade. Then the trailer hands over its most loaded piece of dialogue: “The only treasure I want has been waiting for four years.” The next words, alone on a black frame, are “My son.” An italicised voice, somebody speaking as Lupin rather than to him, answers: “I just want to play with you. Lupin against Lupin.” Another voice, older and flatter, delivers the line that reads like a thesis: “You don’t just become Lupin overnight.”
Put those beside each other and a reading assembles itself, and it is worth saying plainly that the trailer never confirms it. The season jumps four years. The treasure Assane wants has been waiting exactly four years. The new thief is a child-coded hacker, and the calling card left behind is decorated with stickers. Somebody says “My son.” And Etan Simon, who played Assane’s son Raoul across the first three parts, is not on the Part 4 cast list Netflix has announced. Two new names, Théo Christine and Laïka Blanc-Francard, have joined with their roles still undisclosed. That is a lot of arrows pointing one direction, and it may be misdirection, because misdirection is the entire genre.
Around Sy the returning bench is intact, with Claire (Ludivine Sagnier), Youssef Guédira (Soufiane Guerrab) and Sofia Belkacem (Shirine Boutella) all back. Guédira in particular gets one of the trailer’s better reaction shots as the police side starts to catch up. George Kay created the series with François Uzan and remains on it, and Part 4’s eight episodes are split between three directors: Edouard Salier, Everardo Gout and Hugo Gélin. That is a fairly large creative committee for a show whose pleasure has always been precision. Tonal consistency across the run is the thing worth watching for, rather than any individual set piece.
The remaining dialogue sketches the shape of the case without giving up the mechanics. “Whoever did this is very good,” someone concedes. Assane, from inside, works out the scale of the problem: “Someone is going to a lot of trouble to pin this on me.” A younger voice asks, “My father’s not your only enemy?” An exasperated one snaps, “It’s your mess, Assane!” and another simply says, “You’re the chaos.” Assane’s own statement of intent is the flattest line in the cut, and probably the truest: “I want to clear my name.” Then the trailer answers its own question about method: “Why do it discreetly, when you can do it with flair?”
Flair is the closing argument. The last stretch is mounted police crossing a Paris park, and a car going up on a jack in the middle of a street. In among it, Assane stands in a gilded room with red velvet behind him and a staff badge clipped to his chest, turning a gold crown over in both hands and almost smiling. “I’ll take everything,” he says. “Your impunity.” Then the tower: a long night sequence inside the ironwork of the Eiffel Tower, Assane in a flat cap and a red jumper under a long dark coat, climbing through the girders with the city glittering below him. “And above all, your arrogance.” The tower lights up, the title card drops, and Netflix leaves you five weeks to decide who you think is holding the stickers.
What Do You Think? Is the new Lupin really Raoul grown up, or is the trailer stacking that reading deliberately so the actual reveal lands harder? Does putting Assane in a cell for the opening stretch strengthen the show by forcing him to work through other people, or does it strand the one thing everybody watches for? And after four years away, does “Lupin” still work as a heist series, or has the Assane-versus-his-own-legend material quietly become the real engine?
See you on the next binge!
