The finale of the new Netflix thriller Behind Her Eyes, from Hannibal’s Steve Lightfoot, leaves its viewers with an abundance of questions: Why is Rob doing this? Is Adele still alive? And what happened to Louise?
The show’s ending is a mess — not in the form of poor production quality, but rather, it drops a huge bomb on its audience at the very last moment.
As the show just premiered, there is no sign of a Season 2, so until then let’s break down the ending of Behind Her Eyes.
Behind Her Eyes follows single mother Louise Barnsley (Simona Brown) and her affair with her boss, David (Tom Bateman). She quickly discovers that David is married to a woman named Adele (Eve Hewson) and after an unfortunate meeting, Louise becomes friends with Adele. However, things are revealed to not be as cut-and-dry as it seems.
Spoilers for Behind Her Eyes Season 1
Throughout the series, the audience is introduced to a close friend of Adele, Rob (Robert Aramayo). They met during their stint in a psychiatric hospital.
Information is revealed about Rob through a series of flashbacks and through Louise’s experience reading his old journal. The journal was given to her by Adele after the two grew connected over their battle with night terrors.
After Rob and Adele are released from their psychiatric care, Rob has a harder time finding his footing. Meanwhile, Adele is living with her longtime boyfriend, David, in her family castle. The two are quickly reunited and they are seen getting into some seemingly harmless mischief.
On the surface, their friendship seems impenetrable. Rob was infatuated with Adele and claimed that he would “do anything for her.” But, after he meets David, Rob is star-struck and is shown growing envious of Adele’s relationship.
This is where Behind Her Eyes inserts its exciting paranormal twist: Adele was a practitioner of astral projection. This means she was able to have out-of-body experiences and separate her consciousness from her body.
Adele teaches Rob this practice and he tricks her into switching bodies with him, under the guise of it being temporary.
It turns out that Rob had taken over Adele’s body when they were young adults, thus living Adele’s adult life in disguise. To rid of Rob’s body, which was then occupied by Adele’s consciousness, “Adele” forces Rob to overdose and then dumps the body in a well.
What happens to Louise?
In the present, while Louise is reading Rob’s journal, she begins following his advice and finds herself experiencing an astral projection. As her body is asleep, her mind travels to her neighbor’s apartment.
After being awakened by her son’s fearful screaming — he couldn’t wake her up — Louise rushes to her neighbor’s place under the impression of needing coffee, but in actuality, she looks around and realizes that the events in her “dream” align with real life.
With this realization, she learns that “Adele” can do the same thing. But this is where things go wrong, Louise lets her kind heart get in the way of her logic. After receiving a tearful message from “Adele,” Louise rushes over.
“Adele” has seemingly attempted suicide by setting her house on fire. Terrified, Louise decides to use her astral projection skills to occupy “Adele’s” body and walk her out of the house.
While she does this, Rob leaves Adele’s body and takes control of Louise’s. He then injects Louise, who is now in Adele’s body, with a deadly amount of heroin before carrying her body out of the house.
This is where “Louise” (now Rob) is found, cradling Adele’s (now Louise) body.
Time passes and it’s revealed that David has married “Louise” (still Rob) and isn’t aware of the astral projection which occurred, as young Adele never shared this hobby of hers with him. However, Louise’s son seems to be catching on as he points out the oddities in his mom’s current behavior.
To summarize, it’s quite the doozy! The real Louise is seemingly dead and Rob has switched from occupying Adele’s adult body to now occupying Louise’s.
Behind Her Eyes is available for streaming on Netflix.