Netflix’s ‘A Couple of Lies’ Ending Explained: Who Killed Tom and What Becomes of Scarlett

The ending of ‘A Couple of Lies’ arrives after four episodes of mounting suspicion, and it reframes nearly everything that came before it. The Swedish psychological thriller premiered on Netflix on October 30, based on a novel by Stefan Ahnhem and directed by Kasper Barfoed.

The premise is easy to state. Helene and Carl trade their home in the Stockholm archipelago for a villa in Sicily, swapping lives for a few weeks with Scarlett and Adam, a couple they have never met. The finale reveals who is responsible for the body discovered at that villa, and why the house swap was staged in the first place.

Who Killed Tom in the Sicilian Villa

A dead body is found in a well at the Sicilian villa, and Carl assumes it belongs to the missing tourist the police have been searching for. When he learns the tourist has been found alive, he is left wondering whom the body belongs to.

Helene eventually calls the police, and the body is identified as Tom, Scarlett’s brother. Suspicion falls on Carl, who claims he has no memory of ever being at the villa before, even though his phone confirms he was there. He is arrested soon after.

Carl did not kill Tom. Tom caught Adam and Helene together at the villa and threatened to tell Scarlett, and Adam responded by pushing him down the stairs. Scarlett had cut her brother off earlier that morning, so no one expected to hear from him for a while, which gave Adam time to build a plan.

Why Helene and Adam Framed Carl

The motive begins with an affair. Helene and Adam had been secretly involved, and the child Helene is carrying is Adam’s rather than Carl’s. Adam had married Scarlett largely for her money and connections while he was still a struggling artist, so he had little reason to stay in the marriage once Helene could inherit Carl’s wealth.

Carl’s health problems made him an easy target. Adam knew about Carl’s blackouts and saw a way to convince everyone, Carl included, that he was the killer. Over the following weeks, he and Helene arranged things so that every piece of evidence pointed toward Carl.

The frame does not hold for long. Carl is freed because the police lacked the judge’s signature needed to use the evidence from his phone. That release is the first real crack in the scheme, because it puts a suspicious husband back in the same room as the woman who helped build the case against him.

How Ragnar Upends Helene’s Plan

Once he is free, Carl begins to question how events led to his arrest and grows suspicious of Helene. Shortly before she kills him, he leaves a voice message for his friend and business partner Ragnar, voicing his doubts about her.

Helene stages the killing so it looks like she acted to protect herself, but the whole incident is captured in the message that reaches Ragnar. That recording becomes the leverage that decides what she is left with.

Rather than handing her over to the authorities, Ragnar makes Helene sign over all of Carl’s shares to him, which leaves her with almost nothing. The outcome is a bitter irony for the plan. With the shares gone, the reason for removing Carl is nullified, and silencing Scarlett becomes even more important to them.

What Happens to Scarlett and Silvia

Scarlett never fully accepts the case against Carl. She wonders why he would return to the very house where he supposedly killed her brother, and she turns to her neighbor Silvia, who once worked in Major Crimes. Scarlett finds a secret phone belonging to Adam after following him into the forest, and Silvia has it unlocked with help from a former colleague.

The messages expose everything. They show that Adam and Helene had been working together from the start, and that they staged the house swap to frame Carl. Adam spikes Scarlett’s drink, then drags Silvia to a cliff and kills her, though Silvia manages to leave a message warning Scarlett.

The final confrontation turns on a detail the series planted earlier. Helene hits Scarlett on the head and Adam tries to drown her, but Scarlett can hold her breath for several minutes. When Adam lowers his guard, she attacks, and he slips on the stairs and dies on impact. Scarlett lets Helene go because Helene is pregnant, and she asks whether the child is Adam’s before telling her to run.

The aftermath is bleak for the survivor. The police find Adam and Silvia, Scarlett tells them everything, and Carl’s name is cleared, while officers in Sweden and Italy are left searching for her. One review of the series noted that some of the twists are easy to spot and the characters are hard to like, yet the four short episodes keep the pace moving. Do you think Scarlett was right to let a pregnant Helene walk away after what she and Adam did to Tom, Silvia and Carl, or does that mercy simply leave the finale of ‘A Couple of Lies’ with one more lie waiting to surface?