We don’t know about you, but Watch With Us is personally obsessed with the number of fantastic new crime and mystery shows that have been available on streaming lately.
From the compelling cat-and-mouse game of The Beast in Me to the twisty Harlan Coben excellence of Run Away, mystery fans have been eating.
But even more than a good mystery, we love an ending that throws you for a loop. So, we ranked our five favorite recent shows with endings you won’t see coming.
Our picks include the YA novel adaptation We Were Liars and the sci-fi thriller Behind Her Eyes.
Disclaimer: Spoilers ahead.
Adapted from E. Lockhart’s 2014 novel of the same name, We Were Liars centers on the old-money Sinclair family, who travel to Beechwood Island for the summer. There, carefree teen Cadence Sinclair (Emily Alyn Lind) spends time with her cousins Johnny (Joseph Zada) and Mirren (Esther McGregor), along with Gat (Shubham Maheshwari), whom Cadence has a crush on. When the group — who call themselves the “Liars” — attends a boat party, Cadence washes ashore months later with no memory, and when she reunites with the Liars one year later, the secrets the Sinclair family has been hiding start to come out of the woodwork.
We Were Liars is a tantalizing blend of family drama, psychological thriller and an engaging mystery waiting to be unlocked. In the end, it is revealed that Mirren, Johnny and Gat all died in the fire that they themselves started on the boat party as an act of rebellion, and Cadence has been speaking to their ghosts for the entire season. Maybe the “they were ghosts the whole time” trope is a tired one, but it sure caught us by welcome surprise.
Self-made working mom Marissa Irvine (Sarah Snook) goes to pick up her son Milo (Duke McCloud) from a playdate with a new student, only to arrive and discover her worst nightmare — that her son isn’t there. To make matters worse, the boy’s mother has never met Marissa or Milo and has no idea who they are. Alongside her husband Peter (Jake Lacy), Marissa embarks on a desperate search for her son that begins to tear her family apart. But when Marissa bonds with fellow mom Jenny (Dakota Fanning), their alliance uncovers dark secrets that involve both their families.
All Her Fault works well as a thoughtful commentary on the pressures placed on mothers as well as how class dictates where blame is placed. The twist is also particularly insane: Jenny’s nanny, Carrie Finch (Sophia Lillis), ultimately kidnapped Milo because Milo is her biological son. Years earlier, Marissa and Peter got into a car accident with Carrie, in which Peter and Marissa’s infant son was killed while Carrie’s survived. Believing Carrie to be dead, Peter took her living baby as his and Marissa’s own, and Peter soon emerges as someone more sinister than a grieving father.
Former news anchor Anna (Tessa Thompson) has withdrawn from her life and career following a personal tragedy, living alone and distancing herself from everyone in her life. But when she hears of murders that occurred in her childhood Georgia town of Dahlonega, Anna finds herself motivated back into action, drawn to resolve loose threads from her past. When she arrives in Dahlonega, she begins digging into the circumstances of crimes, convinced the town’s history holds the key. At the same time, Anna’s estranged, detective husband, Jack (Jon Bernthal), has been assigned to the case, and he is deeply suspicious of Anna’s involvement.
Halfway through gripping the finale of His & Hers, it appears that the murder has been solved, pinned on local newswoman Lexy Jones, who allegedly killed the people who bullied her in high school as revenge. But then after the case is shut, a year passes before Anna realizes that Lexy wasn’t the killer — it was Anna’s mother, Alice (Crystal Fox). All the murdered women were girls Anna knew in high school, and Alice killed them and framed Lexy out of revenge for their involvement in an attack against Anna when she was a teenager.
Investment banker Simon Greene (James Nesbitt) travels to New York to search for his daughter Paige (Ellie de Lange), whom he hasn’t heard from in six months. When Simon finds her strung out in a park, his attempts to take her home are obstructed by a physical altercation with Paige’s boyfriend, Aaron (Thomas Flynn). Paige runs off, disappearing again — and then Aaron turns up dead the next day. With a target pinned on his back, Simon races to find what happened to his daughter by going down a dark path into a dangerous underworld.
As it always goes with Harlan Coben adaptations, Run Away is twisty and entertaining as hell, and the ending is just as wild as you’re probably thinking it might be. While the Greene family is reunited, it is uncovered that it was Simon’s wife, Ingrid (Minnie Driver), who killed Aaron as payback for getting her daughter addicted to drugs. But that discovery isn’t even the half of it: Aaron and Paige are half-siblings, and Aaron is Ingrid’s son by a cult leader connected to other murders that take place in the series.
Single mother Louise (Simone Brown) works an unfulfilling job as a secretary, but her day-to-day gets a little more exciting when she begins an affair with her new boss, David (Tom Bateman). However, their affair takes a strange turn when Louisa unexpectedly strikes up a friendship with David’s wife, Adele (Eve Hewson), who is new in town and eager to make friends. As Louise enters into an odd love triangle in which David is unaware of her friendship with Adele, and Adele is unaware of her affair with David, Louise soon comes to understand that the couple is not all they appear to be, and before she knows it, she is wrapped up in a dangerous web of lies.
There are a lot of paths one might anticipate Behind Her Eyes could take for its twist ending, but the real reveal is so ambitiously out-there that it borders on hilarious. The twist of Behind Her Eyes is that it’s actually a body-swap story, and that Adele taught her old friend Rob (Robert Aramayo), whom she met in rehab, how to astral project into other people’s bodies. Having also taught Louise this skill, Louise astral projects out of her body in a climactic moment, during which Adele’s astral projected consciousness steals Louise’s body. Louise is only left with Adele’s currently comatose body, where she goes for good, never to astral project again.
But that’s not all! In even more of a doozy, it is revealed that Adele was never even Adele in the first place. Adele was inhabited the entire time by Rob, who wanted to steal her life. Now, it is Rob who is in Louise’s body, who then marries David, with his true identity unknown to anyone but Louise’s son, who suspects something is amiss with his mom. Behind Her Eyes really takes the cake in crazy endings.
