Breaking Down the Surprise Twist Ending in Netflix’s The Perfect Couple

Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Perfect Couple

As one of the greatest minds of our time once said: Heartbreak feels good in a place like this.

The place in question here is the lush and moneyed Nantucket in The Perfect Couple, the latest Nicole Kidman “rich lady on a beach” glossy mini-series that just hit Netflix. But as every “eat the rich” story of the last few years has taught us—from The White Lotus to Saltburn—the gilded veneer of the super-wealthy is often just one tragedy away from chipping.

Susanne Bier’s series lands us in the sprawling summer home of the Winburys, an affluent family headed by ice-cold matriarch Greer (Kidman) and reluctant husband Tag (Liev Schreiber), on the eve of their son Benji’s (Billy Howle) wedding to Amelia (Eve Hewson). But their opulent nuptials are put on hold when, hours before the ceremony, someone is found dead in the water. Suddenly, everyone on the extended guest list is a suspect. Big “we’ve got The White Lotus at home” energy—it even shares a cast member in Meghann Fahy.

At just six episodes, The Perfect Couple doesn’t take long to fling us into the scandalous debauchery of the mega-loaded and just how far they’d go to keep their business behind their automatic estate gates. Let’s break down its twists and turns.

What happened?

A good murder mystery needs, well, a murder. Or at least a very suspicious death that has enough suspicion around it to get fingers pointing.

Sorry to those still thinking about Fahy’s incredible bait-and-switch power play in season 2 of The White Lotus. In The Perfect Couple, she doesn’t make it out so unscathed. She plays the perfectly-named Merritt Monaco, a low-level Instagram influencer and Amelia’s Maid of Honour.

At the end of the first episode, we discover that the mystery body floating in the shallows outside the Winbury’s windows is Merritt, still in her slinky dress from the rehearsal dinner the night before. Was it an accidental drowning? Or did someone kill her under the cover of darkness? She had barbiturates in her system, so it looks like the latter. 

We soon learn that Merritt had been keeping a huge secret: not only was she having an affair with Tag, but she was pregnant with his baby.

Who are the suspects? 

When someone dies in the orbit of the uber-rich, it’s fair to assume the motive has to do with power, sex, or money. With that in mind, there are a few immediate suspects.

First, there’s Kidman’s Greer, who side-hustles her successful career as an author by making sure her husband’s skeletons never go public. She knows Tag has been repeatedly unfaithful, and she alludes to a history of cleaning up his messes. Of course, Tag is also looking pretty plausible, as Merritt is no longer just a fling he can hide away with an NDA. 

There’s Benji and Amelia, the not-so-soon-to-be husband and wife. Merritt could be a threat to the already fractious relationship Amelia has with Greer, who thinks she’s a golddigger. 

Best man Shooter (Ishaan Khattar) is also high on the police’s list, as there seems to be something fishy going on between him and Greer. The fact he also tries to do a runner off the island immediately doesn’t help. 

Then there are the other Winbury children. Eldest brother and certified douchebag Tom (Jack Reynor) is married to Abby (Dakota Fanning), who is pregnant, but having an affair with his mom’s best friend Isabel (Isabelle Adjani), who also used to sleep with his dad (rich people, right?). He’s in a lot of debt and struggling to keep up with Abby’s high society demands. 

And finally, the youngest teenage brother Will (Sam Nivola) is in a burgeoning relationship with the chief of police’s daughter, and, after discovering his dad’s affair with Merritt the night before the wedding, has a drunken breakdown.

So who did it? 

As The Perfect Couple comes to an end, we get thrown a lot of information and, honestly, a lot of it doesn't go anywhere. Turns out Greer was a high-class escort who Tag hired and fell in love with. She also has a gangster brother who shows up in the second-to-last episode for no real reason other than to explain away some of her suspicious financial choices (Greer helps cover her brother’s recurring gambling debts).

Amelia also hooks up with Shooter, Benji finds out, they fight, they make up and then officially break up. But some things do fall into place, and as soon as they do, the murderer’s identity becomes more and more obvious. 

For the Winbury boys to get access to their bloated trust fund, they have to wait until the youngest child turns 18. Will is only weeks away from the big day, but with a surprise bun in Merritt’s oven, that trust is looking to be sealed for another 18 years. 

We already know that Tom is in massive debt (he’s already asked his dad for a big loan and has borrowed more than $2 million from his Isabel). He’s looking pretty suspicious to the police, but he’s just a red herring. The real killer is his wife, Abby.

Throughout the series, little easter eggs have hinted that Abby murdered Merritt. The Winbury’s maid, Gosha (Irina Dubova), expresses her distaste at anyone cleaning up after themselves because that’s her job after Abby hurriedly washes a glass. Later, Abby jokes to Amelia that she’ll never get arrested because she’s a pregnant white woman. She’s been fairly duplicitous for the whole series, sewing seeds of discord between Amelia and Greer and showing little to no regard for anything but getting her hands on an exclusive apartment in New York City.

The unexplained animal fat (tallow) that they found on Merritt’s body is found to be from some dodgy Korean skincare that Abby has smuggled into the States. When it’s clear Tom is just an entitled buffoon, Abby comes into focus as the one pulling the strings and the police pounce. 

Abby reveals that she snuck barbiturates that Tom had stolen from Amelia’s dying mom into a glass of juice that she gives Merritt while they sit along the beach the night before the wedding. When she suggests they go for a dip, Merritt starts to walk but immediately slumps into the water, where Abby holds her head down until she dies. 

We learn that Abby knew about the trust fund issue and couldn’t wait for Tom to handle it, so she did it herself. She didn’t want Merritt and her baby taking what she saw as her money. She’s arrested and taken away in handcuffs, forced to eat her own words about her beautiful white safety net. 

It's not exactly a shocking ending. By the close of The Perfect Couple, the mystery at hand feels like it is beside the point. The murderer was always going to be one of the family members, but they are each so terrible in their own way that it feels plausible that anyone could have had a reason to be the killer. But if there’s one thing we can take away from The Perfect Couple, it’s that Nicole Kidman has never met a shoreline breeze she didn’t love rustling through her beautifully manicured blowout while she looks pensively out into the horizon. May we continue to get a vehicle for it every year for the rest of time.