Diksha Sundriyal
An idyllic holiday turns deadly for two couples after they swap homes in Netflix’s ‘A Couple of Lies.’ Carl arrives at a Sicilian villa with his wife, Helene, in the hopes of getting a much-needed break. His mental health has been off the rails for a while, which has started to affect his personal and professional life. With a baby on the horizon, he needs to get everything back on track. His struggle to keep everything together worsens in the new environment, where sinister secrets lurk in the shadows and threaten to upend whatever stability he has. Even as Carl starts to put everything together, things get progressively worse. In the end, it seems like he never had a chance, as he had been set up as a fall guy from the beginning. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Carl’s Fate Was Sealed From the Beginning
While an escalating series of events pushes Carl off the edge, his fate had been tragically sealed months before he ever set foot in the villa in Sicily. Unbeknownst to him, his wife, Helene, reconnected with her old flame, Adam, during a visit to Italy. The secret lovers had been involved in an affair a few years back. At the time, Adam was with Scarlett. He was intent on breaking up with her once he had used her money and connections to establish himself in the art scene. However, instead of leaving her, he married her, bringing his affair with Helene to an end. When they unexpectedly cross paths, old feelings resurface, prompting them to resume their affair. So, when Helene gets pregnant, it is actually Adam’s child, not Carl’s.
Despite being in love and having a baby on the way, Adam and Helene cannot leave their spouses because they would be left with nothing. They would likely have continued their affair this way if it weren’t for Scarlett’s brother, Tom. He has always had his suspicions about Adam, and when he finally catches his brother-in-law in the act, he threatens to tell his sister. In an attempt to stop him, Adam throws Tom down the stairs and kills him. Since Scarlett has cut off her brother, Adam realizes that it will take her some time to discover that Tom is missing. So, he makes a plan with Helene, which includes swapping their houses, having Tom’s body found by the cops, and framing Carl for it.
The idea is more likely to work because Carl has been having blackouts for a while. His stress has caused him to break down a couple of times, and he has no idea what he does in that time period. Adam figures that if they leave enough trail of evidence, they might even get Carl himself to believe that he did, in fact, murder Tom. This would not only get him out of the way but also allow Helene to inherit all of her husband’s wealth. With that, she and Adam could live happily ever after, never wanting for anything. And the plan works. When Tom’s body is found, Helene uses Carl’s blackouts to paint him as a violent person. She, with some location data from his phone, makes it look like Carl was at the crime scene when Tom was killed, and he is arrested.
Carl’s Shocking Fate Foils Helene’s Financial Plans
When Helene married Carl, he changed his will to make her the sole inheritor of his wealth. This, in particular, included the shares in his company that he co-founded with his friend, Ragnar. By legal definition, should Carl die or something else happen to him, the shares will be transferred to Helene, making sure she is provided for. She knows about this, and when Carl is arrested, even Ragnar tells her that the shares will soon be transferred in her name. At this point, Helene thinks the plan has worked, but she starts celebrating a bit too soon. It turns out that the cops took Carl’s phone without any proper legal framework, which renders their one piece of evidence against him useless. So, Carl is let out of prison.
Ragnar doesn’t tell Helene about it, believing their reunion would be a happy surprise. So, when Carl returns to his wife, he finds her languishing in the hotel room. She seems to have gone on a shopping and eating binge, which suggests that she wasn’t as sad as she should have been about the idea of her husband going to prison for a murder he didn’t commit. The doubts had started to creep into his mind, but now it becomes clear that she has been trying to frame him. He also suddenly remembers that Helene knew Tom, which she didn’t bother to mention to the cops.
As he starts to piece things together, he is also scared of the person in front of him, so he calls Ragnar for help. Ragnar doesn’t pick up, so Carl leaves him a message from the bathroom. In the meantime, Helene figures out she has been found out, and the only way forward is to kill Carl. Since she has already painted him as a violent person, she hurts herself to make it look like he hit her. Then, she stabs him to death before he can even process what’s happening. What she doesn’t realize is that all this time, the message to Ragnar is still being recorded. So, not only does Carl’s friend hear his doubts, but he also hears the murder being committed.
Now, Ragnar could have gone to the cops with this recording, but even then, all of Carl’s shares would have gone to Helene. Since Carl is already dead, Ragnar figures there is no point in sending his pregnant wife to prison. Instead, he leverages the audio to his own end. He confronts Helene with the recording, and then forces her to sign over all of Carl’s shares to her. She doesn’t have any other option. She doesn’t want to give birth to her child in prison and spend the rest of her life behind bars. So, even as all her efforts prove in vain, she signs over the shares to Ragnar, giving him absolute control of the company. Meanwhile, she is left with nothing, and she and Adam are back to square one.
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