Netflix’s ‘Behind Her Eyes’ Has One Of The Best Endings In Recent Memory

Netflix has a surprise new hit miniseries on its hands, Behind Her Eyes, an adaptation of a novel by  Sarah Pinborough. It’s only six episodes, but it’s making an impact, hanging around at #2 on the Top 10 list, behind only I Care a Lot, the new Rosamund Pike movie (which is surprisingly not based on a book).

Behind Her Eyes starts out the way you would normally think this sort of thing might. A woman shares a kiss with a stranger at a bar, only to discover the next day that he’s her new boss in a psychologist’s office. Things get awkward. There’s ongoing sexual tension between them, but randomly, the woman, Louise, runs into the psychologist David’s wife, Adele. Adele is bored and lonely and for as sweet as David is to Louise, he seems to be equally cruel to Adele, which bothers Louise the more she learns about their relationship.

And then…things get extremely weird. And not in a way I think anyone will expect.

Spoilers follow, and save the rest of this article until you’re finished with the series. Trust me when I say it’s worth seeing it through until the end.

I have watched a lot of this kind of storyline before, and it’s hard to surprise me, but Behind Her Eyes does it on repeat, especially for its incredible double-twist ending that I only saw coming in the closing moments.

Two things never really make sense throughout the course of the series as you watch it. First, the show takes a bizarre detour into the supernatural when we realize that Adele has the ability to astral project, as in, become a conscious force outside her body, which she uses to zip around the city, and it allows her to spy on David and Louise, so she’s known about their affair the entire time.

I guess it makes the story distinct, but I didn’t understand how the plot couldn’t have worked similarly if they had avoided that weird element and Adele had just like, put cameras in David’s office or something.

Also strange was the show’s relentless focus on Rob, a character who Adele meets in rehab and becomes best friends with. The show first wants us to think that David got jealous, killed Rob and dumped him in a well. But then it seems more likely that Adele the sociopath killed Rob, framed David for it, and as such, is able to control him into never leaving her.

But by the very end of the series, it all comes together. The idea that Adele is the real villain the entire time becomes pretty clear soon enough, and she executes an elaborate plan where she commits suicide, but in the process, uses astral projection to swap bodies with Louise (something we didn’t know could actually happen, until it happens here), and this causes her consciousness to die in a fire while Adele gets to occupy her body and marry David.

This would be a pretty solid twist on its own, but Behind Her Eyes pulls off the rare double-twist that genuinely works. In the final scene of the series, we learn that Adele taught Rob how to astral project too, and they experimented with body-swapping. But as soon as they do it, Rob, a drug addict proclaimed as “vicious” by his sister, turns on Adele, strangling her while she’s trapped in his own body. He dumps his old body and Adele’s now extinguished consciousness in the well, and for the last decade it’s been Rob who has been living in Adele’s body, blackmailing David, messing with Louise and then ultimately stealing another body yet again when it suits him.

It’s a wild ending, justifying all the weirdness that came before it, and one that genuinely surprised me even if I figured it out in the closing moments of the show, minutes before the reveal. It fills in so many blanks once you understand it, and the most tragic part is that we now realize that Adele was always good and pure, and this…bizarre, evil “vessel” has been Rob the entire time living a stolen life. The real Adele has been dead ten years.

It’s a limited series, so I doubt we see Rob/Louise get his comeuppance in a second season. It’s the kind of story that really only works once, though it may be unsatisfying for some who are not prone to enjoying tales where the bad guys win. And boy, does Rob win. What an ending, and Behind Her Eyes deserves all the praise and attention it’s getting.

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