Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Netflix's "Behind Her Eyes."
I watched Netflix's Behind Her Eyes earlier this year, and I still can't stop thinking about it. As someone who has always been obsessed with stories about dreams, fractured realities, and flawed memories (somehow always involving fires and mental institutions, both of which the show features as well), the show seemed right up my alley. In many ways, it was exactly my kind of show — a twisty blend of drama, psychological thriller, romance, and surreal world-hopping.
Yet I can't stop thinking about the plot holes, specifically those that took place at the end of the show. Was the ending believable and mind-blowing? Or was it completely batshit, absurd nonsense? I was mind-blown when I first saw it, but I'm starting to honestly think it was the latter.
Behind Her Eyes is a very binge-able and very frustrating Netflix drama about a woman named Louise (Simona Brown), a dedicated single mother who works as a secretary at a therapist's office. When she feels a spark after meeting a new man named David (Tom Bateman) on the rare night out, she's quickly enchanted — only to discover (the next day) that he is actually her brand new boss.
Behind Her Eyes | Official Trailer | Netflixwww.youtube.com
Louise quickly becomes entangled in David's life, and the two — spurred on by their burning chemistry — inevitably start an affair. She also becomes entangled in the life of David's strange wife, Adele, played by a magnetic Eve Hewson.
Hewson, who happens to be Bono's daughter, is magnificently eerie as David's heavily medicated, extremely wealthy, ostensibly perfect housewife. She meets Louise on the street (Louise runs into her and knocks her down), and the two strike up a friendship.
Their relationship is largely orchestrated by Adele, who double-texts her, pressures Louise to go to the gym and spend days off with her, and bans her from saying a word about any of it to her husband. Of course, Louise also can't tell Adele she's sleeping with her husband. The love triangle forms the show's central tension, but of course things are never as they seem.
Louise is also plagued by intense night terrors. She confesses this to Adele, who immediately attempt to teach Louise how to control her dreams. She gives Louise a book written by Rob, her best friend from her time as a patient at a mental hospital.
She also tells Louise about the reason she was in the mental hospital — both her parents died in a fire that tore up their massive, castle-like mansion in the English countryside. We also learn that Rob, a working-class gay heroin addict who seemed to love Adele beyond measure, is currently dead, lying at the bottom of a well.
Along the way, we discover that Adele has the ability to astral project by imagining a door in her lucid dreams and walking through it. She teaches Rob to lucid dream and astral project as well, and the two flutter around her estate in the form of colored orbs, flitting like fairies through the woods.
But there's something very, very wrong with Adele in the present. She constantly seems on the edge of snapping. She does heroin and seems to be deeply terrifying to her husband. Her husband, in turn, tracks her every move, drugs her, and bans her from seeing anyone at all other than him. She makes him elaborate dinners, which appear to amount to psychological torture to him; their relationship is not exactly fine.
Then things really go haywire.
Here is the twist, with major spoiler alerts as a caveat (seriously, stop reading if you even might watch the show):
