Major spoilers for The Girl Before
The Girl Before, HBO Max’s twisting mystery thriller, is four unsettling hours worth of television as the limited series slowly reveals the true nature of the killer in the plot.
The show manages to both play into expected elements of the genre such as tragic backstories, creepy characters, and an increasing air of foreboding whilst also subverting expectations as well.
For instance, Edward Monkford–played with restraint, fragility, and a simmering temper by David Oyelowo–is the man the series spends its time luring the audience into believing is capable of murder while also making us question the supposed clues pointing to him as the killer.
By the climax of The Girl Before, it’s clear that despite Edward’s disturbing obsessive tendencies and need for his life to follow a strict pattern, he’s not the person who set the murder plot in motion. It’s Jane (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who discovers this truth and nearly loses her life when she comes upon the real killer.
It turns out that the relationship between the young couple who first moved into Edward’s smart house is the toxic romance we should have been paying the most attention to all along. Given that the series premiere ends with Emma’s (Jessica Plummer) death and the show’s climax concludes with Simon’s (Ben Hardy), there’s a nice bookend to The Girl Before‘s murder plot that fits well for a series dedicated to parallel storylines.
Here’s how the two died in the HBO Max original.
Who dies in The Girl Before?
The Girl Before on HBO Max, image courtesy HBO
Emma
The overarching mystery afoot in The Girl Before lies in whether or not Emma was pushed down the stairs of the house on One Folgate Street or if she’d simply fallen. Edward doesn’t believe in handrails, so the stairs in his minimalist house are a safety hazard and a risk for anyone moving from one floor to the next in the home.
Emma’s ex-boyfriend, Simon, tried to lure Jane into the belief that Edward had killed Emma. The two had a relationship, and the chaos of the woman’s life didn’t fit into the orderliness that the architect likes to conduct his life in. But Edward wasn’t in the home when Emma died…Simon was.
He’d been standing guard over Emma because the burglar she’d accused of rape fully intended to harm her. The man had even broken into her house, but Simon stopped him from getting too far into the home and sent him packing.
As grateful as Emma was for his help, which she expressed, it didn’t mean she was willing to give her relationship with Simon another try. She wanted them to be friends, but Simon wanted to rekindle their romance.
He even went as far as tricking Emma into believing Edward was interested in another chance just to see if his ex would go back to the man he believes ruined their relationship in the first place. Seeing that Emma was willing to try again with the architect but not him set Simon off.
In a heated exchange that turned physical, he grabbed hold of Emma and started yelling about how he loves her and then pushed her away from him. She fell down the stone steps of the house and cracked her head against the home’s stone floor, dying instantly.
Emma was a victim of a crime of passion. Simon killed her.
Simon
Simon’s obsession with Emma resulted in her unfortunate death, however, it didn’t stop when she died. When Jane moved into the house, she kept coming across a bouquet of flowers left by the front door. As she later found out, they were being left by Simon. They were meant for Emma, or rather, her memory.
The gesture and his devastation over Emma’s loss lured Jane into a false sense of security with Simon. She believed him to be trustworthy even though she couldn’t quite get on board with the notion that it was Edward who’d killed Emma.
Her comfort with Simon resulted in the two having dinner together at the house. For her it was meant to be a friendly sit down while for Simon it was an opportunity to ask Jane out. She turned him down and the rejection set him off as he was once again playing second fiddle to Edward.
In a parallel to what happened to Emma, Jane and Simon got into a heated exchange when she tried to escape. She hit him with an exact replica of the pearl necklace Edward had given Emma that Simon had snatched off her neck.
Those same pearls were what Simon held onto when the momentum of his struggle with Jane sent him hurtling backward, however, they broke and he fell down the stone steps. Like Emma he cracked his head on the stone floor and died instantly but instead of a crime of passion, this was self-defense.
The manner in which Simon died is both a parallel to Emma’s death and a juxtaposition that brings the murder plot in The Girl Before full circle.
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Who dies in The Girl Before?
Source: Pinoy White Knights
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