Analysis of the surprising ending of “The Perfect Couple”

Warning: Spoilers for The perfect couple

One of the greatest minds of our time once said: “In a place like this, heartbreak is good.”

The place in question is the lush and wealthy Nantucket in The Dream coupleNicole Kidman's latest glossy miniseries, “Rich Lady on a Beach,” which just hit Netflix. But as every “Eat the Rich” story of the past few years has taught us – from The White Lotus To Saltburn– the golden facade of the super-rich often crumbles at the next tragedy.

Susanne Bier's series takes us into the sprawling summer home of the Winburys, a wealthy family led by the icy matriarch Greer (Kidman) and her reluctant husband Tag (Liev Schreiber), on the eve of their son Benji's (Billy Howle) wedding to Amelia (Eve Hewson). But their lavish wedding is put on hold when someone is found dead in the water hours before the ceremony. Suddenly everyone on the extended guest list is a suspect. Big “We have The White Lotus at home” energy – the film even has the same cast member, Meghann Fahy.

With only six episodes The Dream couple It's not long before we're drawn into the scandalous excesses of the super-rich and the lengths they'd go to keep their business behind the automatic gates of their housing developments. Let's break down the twists and turns.

What happened?

A good crime story needs, well, a murder. Or at least a very suspicious death that arouses enough suspicion to point the finger at the perpetrators.

I am sorry to all of you who are still thinking about Fahy’s incredible bait and switch power play in Season 2 of The White Lotus. In The Dream coupleshe doesn't get off scot-free. She plays the aptly named Merritt Monaco, a minor Instagram influencer and Amelia's maid of honor.

At the end of the first episode, we learn that the mysterious body floating in the shallow water outside the Winburys' windows is Merritt, still wearing her skin-tight dress from the rehearsal dinner the night before. Did she accidentally drown? Or did someone kill her under cover of darkness? She had barbiturates in her system, so it looks more like the latter.

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

Who are the suspects?

When someone in the super-rich dies, it's safe to assume the motive is related to power, sex or money. With that in mind, there are a few immediate suspects.

First, there's Kidman's Greer, who funds her successful writing career by making sure her husband's corpses are never released to the public. She knows that Tag has been repeatedly unfaithful, and she alludes to the fact that she has repeatedly ironed out his mistakes in the past. Of course, Tag also seems quite believable, as Merritt is no longer just an affair he can hide with a non-disclosure agreement.

There's Benji and Amelia, who won't be married anytime soon. Merritt could pose a threat to the already strained relationship between Amelia and Greer, who thinks she's a gold digger.

The best man, Shooter (Ishaan Khattar), is also at the top of the detectives' list, as there seems to be something fishy between him and Greer. The fact that he immediately tries to disappear from the island doesn't help.

Then there are the other Winbury children. The eldest brother and complete idiot Tom (Jack Reynor) is married to the pregnant Abby (Dakota Fanning) but is having an affair with his mother's best friend Isabel (Isabelle Adjani), who also slept with his father (rich people, right?). He is heavily in debt and struggling to live up to Abby's high society demands.

And finally, the youngest brother, teenager Will (Sam Nivola), is in a budding relationship with the police chief's daughter. When he learns of his father's affair with Merritt on the night before the wedding, he suffers an alcohol-induced breakdown.

So who was it?

As The Dream couple comes to an end, we're bombarded with a lot of information and, frankly, a lot of it goes nowhere. It turns out that Greer was a high-class escort that Tag hired and fell in love with. She also has a gangster brother who shows up in the penultimate episode for no real reason other than to explain some of her suspect financial decisions (Greer helps pay off her brother's recurring gambling debts).

Amelia also has something going on with Shooter, Benji finds out, they argue, make up and then officially break up. But some things fall into place and once they do, the identity of the killer becomes more and more obvious.

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

We already know that Tom is deeply in debt (he has already asked his father for a large loan and borrowed over $2 million from Isabel). He seems quite suspicious to the police, but he is just a diversion. The real murderer is his wife Abby.

Throughout the series, little Easter eggs hint at Abby murdering Merritt. The Winburys' maid, Gosha (Irina Dubova), expresses her dislike for anyone cleaning up after themselves because that's their job after Abby hastily washes a glass. Later, Abby jokes to Amelia that she'll never get arrested because she's a pregnant white woman. She was pretty duplicitous throughout the series, sowing discord between Amelia and Greer and showing little to no regard for anything other than securing an exclusive apartment in New York City.

The unexplained animal fat (sebum) they found on Merritt's body came from a dubious Korean skincare product that Abby smuggled into the States. When it becomes clear that Tom is just a conceited jerk, Abby comes into focus as the one pulling the strings and the police take action.

Abby reveals that she smuggled barbiturates that Tom stole from Amelia's dying mother into a glass of juice that she gives to Merritt as they sit on the beach the night before the wedding. When she suggested taking a bath, Merritt started to walk away but immediately collapsed into the water, where Abby held her head down until she died.

We learn that Abby knew about the trust fund issue and couldn't wait for Tom to take care of it, so she took care of it herself. She didn't want Merritt and her baby taking what she considered to be her money. She is arrested and led away in handcuffs, and is forced to take back her own words about her beautiful white safety net.

This is not a really shocking ending. At the end of The Dream couplethe mystery at hand seems beside the point. The killer was always a family member, but they are all so horrific in their own way that it seems plausible that anyone could have had a reason to be the killer. But if there is one thing we can learn from The Dream coupleit's that Nicole Kidman has never met an ocean breeze she didn't enjoy, running it through her beautifully manicured hair as she gazed thoughtfully into the horizon. May we get a vehicle for that every year for the rest of time.