Paris, at the end of the 30's, Laura and Kate Barlow are two young sister fortune-tellers, just finishing their European tour. Exhausted by the tour and faced with the competition of new practices, they meet Andre Korben, a big cinema producer. He is a controversial visionary; the owner of the largest cinema studio in France, using the latest American techniques to keep his company out of the doldrums. Out of a desire to test his own scepticism and a keen sense of curiosity, Korben invites the two sisters to hold a private seance: the result turns his world upside down. He is so disturbed that he offers them a contract to try out ambitious experiments on film. He tells himself that cinema must innovate and surprise to evolve, that he can make the first truly authentic ghost film. But Lauren quickly gathers that Korben has other, more secret reasons for having employed them. Together they end up forming a strange family as the onset of World War II approaches.