S omething strange has happened with Lupin. Two years after the French jewel heist thriller’s third season aired, its series one plotline played out in real life, in the form of a global news story turned viral sensation. The Louvre heist of 2025 happened by day – while Lupin’s main character Assane Diop (Omar Sy) stole jewels from the Louvre at night. The real-life robbers posed as construction workers – Diop posed as a caretaker. You couldn’t help but draw comparisons.

So it returns for the fourth series with a salience the makers could never have predicted – amid a renewed appreciation of the power of a cleverly crafted disguise to dupe even the world’s most revered cultural institutions.

Things are higher-budget, higher stakes and more cinematic from the title card onwards. The show’s central question seems to be: what happens when a mastermind finds themselves a victim of their own intelligence?…