Behind Her Eyes: That Shocking Twist Of The Decade In The End Explained

More often than not, thrillers centered around a couple and a third person almost always have very cliched, disappointing endings as one of them ends up being a psychotic murderer. But with Netflix’s latest series, Behind Her Eyes, you can keep your complaints on the shelf because it serves one delicious twist after another, coupled with a supremely shocking ending that you won’t see coming. 

Based on the novel of the same name by Sarah Pinborough, the story of Behind Her Eyes follows Louise, a single mother, who runs into a handsome, charming man at the bar and their engaging conversation ends with him kissing her only to break it off muttering how he shouldn’t do this. The next day Louis finds out that the stranger is none other than her new boss, Dr. David Fergusson, a successful psychiatrist who is married to a beautiful woman named Adele. 

Despite vowing to not act on their feelings now that Louise knows that David is married, they eventually give in to their mutual attraction for one another and start a shaky affair. But, out-of-the-blue, Adele comes across Louise one day and offers to have coffee with her as she is new in town, thus beginning a friendship with the woman with whom her husband is in a relationship.

From here on Behind Her Eyes, starts dishing shocking twists in three enticing layers of mysteries:

Behind Her Eyes is about David abusing Adele

From the beginning, we see a meek Adele quietly taking the countless pills her husband ensures she takes and submits to his incessant calls to confirm that she is indeed at home. Louise starts finding his behavior more and more suspicious.

Simultaneously, she sympathizes with Adele and their friendship grows as Louise is sure that David is an abusive husband. While Adele does appear to be the odd duck at times, she retains her innocent demeanor, at least until she goes out of her way to let David know that she is friends with Louise- a secret the latter never shared with David as a promise to Adele. 

This leads to a heated exchange between the two with David firing Louise and warning her to never come near his marriage again. This only prompts Louise to dig further and as she already believes that David has psychopathic tendencies. But soon Louise finds out that the truth is something else entirely. 

Adele and the phenomenon of astral projection

We already get major crazy-wife vibes from Adele and are almost sure that David is feeding her the tablets to keep her calm as well. She also makes things up to break up David and Louise. What we didn’t see coming was how Adele possesses the ability to astral project her soul out of her body and spy on places she has already been to.

We get fleeting glimpses of her past- Adele is a Scottish heiress whose house burned down when she was very young and her parents died while she was saved by David who loved her. Post their death, she suffered a mental breakdown and was admitted to a mental asylum for a few months. Here she indeed befriends a Rob, who is another patient and soon they become good friends. When they leave the place and reach Adele’s estate, she teaches him how to astral project too, sharing her secret with him. 

But somehow, Rob never made it alive out of there and we see her remembering his body in a well on the property. We soon see that Rob apparently died after taking an overdose of heroin and in her panic, Adele dumped his body in the well, mistakenly dropping David’s watch in with him. When David tries to call the police, she warns him that she will tell them that he killed Rob.

Louis who is already suspicious of Adele and her lofty tales decides to check up on the last place the couple lived, where she said her husband had an affair with a woman named Marianne who is the owner of a diner. But upon meeting Marianne, Louise discovers that there was never any affair and all she did was offer David advice that if he is unhappy in his marriage, he should end it. Somehow Adele knew what they had talked about, even though David never told her, and she ended up terrorizing Marianne, prompting the couple to relocate to make a fresh start. 

For some reason, Adele tought Louise how to astral project as a means to get rid of her nightmares. After her chat with Marianne, Louise adds up the clues as to how Adele “knows about people,” thus discovering that she has been spying on her this whole time and the entire friendship, as well as the act of being innocent, was all a sham. But the damage has already been done- in a bid to protect Adele from David’s supposed abuse, Louise wrote an anonymous letter to the police, tipping them off about Rob’s body in the estate and the possibility that he was killed by David. 

She confronts Adele and shares how her lies have incriminated David who is on his way to surrender. So, Adele decides to save her husband by writing a letter accepting that she is responsible for Rob’s death and then proceeds to burn down the house after taking a dose of heroin. But it’s when a worried Louise arrives at her door to save her, that the real bombshell revelation is made. 

Adele has not been Adele for a long time

Unable to break down the front door, Louise decides to astral project her soul to check in on Adele, thus committing a big mistake as the minute she leaves her body, Adele’s soul which is stronger and more experienced at astral projection, tricks her into swapping bodies. So, now Adele is in Louise’s body and vice versa. She taught Louise to astral project, knowing that her kindness would one day end up being useful to Adele. She then proceeds to administer a heavy dose of heroin to her body, effectively killing Louise and then pretends that she tried to save her friend but couldn’t. 

But the real shocker in Behind Her Eyes arrives in a flashback where we see Rob, already infatuated with Adele’s money and with David, suggesting to her to try something with him- a twist he has added to astral projection. They go into the woods and Rob injects himself with heroin to astral project. The twist? He wanted to swap bodies with Adele for a while to see if it worked. 

It worked. He landed in Adele’s body and she was trapped in his heroin-weakened shell. Even as she requested him to reverse the process, he (in Adele’s body) proceeded to administer a fatal dose of heroin, thus killing Adele, and then dumped his own body with David’s watch as evidence against him in case he ever discovered the truth. 

Since then, David has been living in a marriage where the drastic change in Adele’s behavior unnerves him. Meanwhile, Rob/Adele have been intentionally ruining David’s chances at happiness. This is how Louise became her new victim- Rob/Adele knew that David was at his breaking point and would soon seek a divorce. So, by exchanging his soul with Louise, Rob ensured that David is once again tricked into believing that he is with the person he loves. 

While we did predict that Adele is the insane, psycho killer in the picture, we couldn’t have ever thought that Behind Her Eyes Season 1 would end with this mother of all twists. 

Starring Simona Brown, Tome Bateman, and Eve Hewson, Behind Her Eyes is now streaming on Netflix.