Lupin returns on Netflix with season four, as Assane faces surveillance and a copycat thief

A return under surveillance

Season four of the French series Lupin reaches Netflix on Friday, 23 October, with eight episodes. Omar Sy returns as Assane Diop, a thief who takes his alias from Arsène Lupin, the gentleman burglar created by the novelist Maurice Leblanc more than 100 years ago. Tagesspiegel describes the new run as a season in which the thief meets a technology that threatens his best tricks. The Guardian, reviewing the opening episode, frames the season around surveillance and the question of what happens when a mastermind becomes the victim of his own intelligence. El Periódico, which spoke with Sy for its own coverage, says critics had seen only the first episode before the premiere.

A frame-up and a week from release

At the start of the season, Assane wants to live legally and be a good father to his son Raoul, to whom he promised a trip to Senegal so the boy could know the family roots, according to El Periódico. A copycat Lupin then stages a sophisticated double robbery in which one person nearly dies, and everyone blames Assane. The Guardian reports that Diop is a week away from release in a maximum security prison when technology across Paris is hacked and warnings signed with the name Lupin appear. He is placed in a straitjacket and locked in a glass cell where guards and prisoners can watch him. Blurry security footage showing a Black robber is taken as proof of his guilt, the Guardian writes, and his skin, which had often helped him pass unnoticed as a janitor or delivery worker, becomes the basis of suspicion. El Periódico says he can only prove his innocence by becoming Lupin again.

The backstory of the alias

Tagesspiegel sets out the origins of the story. Assane grows up with his father Babakar, a chauffeur for the super-rich entrepreneur Hubert Pellegrini, who is involved in shady dealings of his own. Pellegrini accuses the driver of stealing a valuable necklace, and Babakar goes to prison and dies there. Assane, still a teenager at the time, is shaken by the loss. Twenty-five years later he learns that his father was innocent and Pellegrini was the real culprit, and he sets out for revenge. Tagesspiegel notes that wealthy people often overlook him because he is Black, a form of everyday racism that Lupin learns to use to his advantage. A book Babakar gave his son, a collection of Arsène Lupin stories, keeps the father close to him and gives Assane a model of a thief who outwits the rich without violence.

Cast and the Louvre parallel

Ludivine Sagnier plays Claire, Assane's former girlfriend, whose son Raoul is put in danger by the thief's enemies. Soufiane Guerrab plays the detective Youssef Guedira, who is himself fascinated by the fictional master criminal, and Shirine Boutella plays the police officer Sofia, who works with him. Antoine Gouy plays Benjamin, Assane's closest friend. The Guardian points out that the season arrives two years after the third season aired and shortly after the 2025 Louvre heist, in which the real robbers posed as construction workers, while Assane's character posed as a caretaker. The paper says that comparison is hard to avoid, and that the new season draws on a renewed interest in how a clever disguise can fool even the most revered cultural institutions.