I'll begin at the end.
A family portrait hidden in the shadows. The little light allows us to identify a girl who observes, with dread upon her face, her father or close relative sitting beside.
The girl is Carole, the film's protagonist. In the story she's an adult now and lives with her sister, works as a manicurist, abhors a male.
Clearly marked by a sexual abuse in childhood, apparently involving the mysterious man in the picture, Carole spends her nights tormented by the memory of this crime against her innocence. And the act's timeless strength, raised in Carole's memory by the unmistakable sound of ticking clocks and bells in a steeple, creates the illusion of a wicked man prowling around her room, forcing her door, or tragically appearing beside her in bed and committing the silent and terrifying abuse, judging from the paralysis of Catherine Deneuve's eyes.
The evil power of memory irreversibly disrupts the life of the manicurist when her sister goes away on a trip and leave her alone in the apartment where they live. At this same period, a young man insists on dating Carole and receives all sorts of negatives, beginning with the simple omission of the manicurist and culminating in his brutal murder by a tormented Carole, compelled to eliminate everything that refers to the male universe.
But Carole is not kept free of her body's natural desires and feelings that involuntarily permeate her youthful dreams. She wanted to surrender to the man who admires and respects her, but the strength of her trauma, her repulsion is much more powerful. And in answer to those desires violently restrained, the environment expands, it decreases, it softens. The walls of Carole's apartment are opened in cracks, hands are projected in the aisles as a desperate appeal for touching.
Given the paralysis of the manicurist, the apartment is driven to open itself as a shell to reveal a Venus recently touched by the mystery of love.