WARNING: This article contains MAJOR spoilers from the finale of The Undoing. You have been warned…
BINGE’s miniseries, The Undoing, has taken the world by storm with its twists and turns and its whodunnit style.
Starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant (who are oddly the perfect pairing), the series has been created by Oscar and Golden Globe-winning director Susan Bier and acclaimed television creator, David E. Kelley.
The story centres around Grace Fraser (Kidman), a psychologist whose world falls apart when her husband, Jonathan (Hugh Grant), is linked to the death of Elena Alves (Matilda De Angelis), a fellow parent at Reardon, their children’s fictional private school in Manhattan. Throughout the first five episodes, audiences were been left with the question — who killed Elena Alves?
On November 30, the question was finally answered. And the big twist? There was no twist.
Throughout the series, the prime suspect was Dr Jonathan Fraser (Hugh Grant) an oncologist-cum-liar, cheater and (here comes the spoiler) murderer. Yup, Dr Fraser, who had been pinned from the get-go killed his lover Elena after she told him she’d “never leave” him.
Of course, there were red herrings a-plenty. Was it Grace? Her father, Franklin Reinhardt (Donald Sutherland) or even their teenage son, Henry Fraser (Noah Jupe) who hid the murder weapon in a bid to seemingly protect his father?
Ultimately, Grace helped to capture her husband, leading to an ending proving just how wickedly vile he was. It was thrilling, spine-tingling and shocking coupled with a brilliant non-twist, which felt like a twist but wasn’t really, which turned the genre on its head. Amazing stuff.
In an interview with Variety, Grant called Fraser “self-delusional” and a “sociopath”.
“He’s just so narcissistic that he believes the real him is the marvellous Jonathan, the star of medicine and a great dad and great husband,” Grant told the outlet. “I think he absolutely lives off adoration, undiluted, unequivocal love.”
“I don’t think the violence he shows when he kills Elena is the first time it’s happened. I think there have been instances in his life before where it’s been hushed up,” he said, referring to Fraser watching his four-year-old sister die.
“There were certainly other moments in the six episodes where I thought it would be a good moment to show a real flash of the true guy and his violence, but had we done it, the weight of evidence on Jonathan would be too heavy; we would have killed the whodunnit. The circumstantial evidence was already so huge even one more ounce of weight in that side of the scales would have tipped it.”