Max Fleming is a grad student who developed a powerful cloning machine for the egotistical Dr. Jonas who steals all the credit and leaves his student to toil in obscurity. One day, Max meets Kate Carson, a young and attractive magazine reporter doing a story on the cloning research at the university. During the interview, Kate accidentally cuts herself, and a few drops of her blood get on one of the cloning samples. Later that night, Max runs a test of the machine, and to his surprise he ends up with a replicant of Kate, which he names Repli-Kate.
In order to put a painful past and a terrible sense of guilt behind her, a sterile young woman named Mathilde (played by Nastassja Kinski) uses extreme cloning methods to give birth to Manon (Audrey DeWilder), and is comforted by her obstetrician husband Thomas (Christopher Lambert). Manon starts off as a very normal child; but suffers from intense nightmares, that we later uncover to be her mother's memories. The child's growth is abnormally rapid and she becomes the splitting image of her mother. Manon becomes determined to destroy her mother's life, even showing affection for Mathilde's husband Thomas. Manon eventually learns what happened to her brother who drowned in the well at the back of their property. Gradually, the relation between them evolves in an odd manner as Manon takes over her mother's role in the family.