Posted by Crime series are a sure bet for Netflix viewers, and many examples prove it over the years. Therefore, it’s no surprise that a series like Unseen caught the audience: a South African production about a cleaning lady getting involved in a sequence of murders, which basically means that crime enters our daily world through a protagonist that looks like one of us. The plot hides many fascinating details, and the series is based on Fatma, another interesting Netflix product. Let’s have the story, the ending, and the origin of the TV show all explained.
You can watch the official trailer for Unseen here on Youtube.
Netflix’s series Unseen: the plot and the ending explained
In Unseen, we follow a cleaning lady in Cape Town, Zenzi, who is involved in some dangerous events: her husband, Max, had spent two years in jail, accused of the murder of Yazid, and right before he was released, two gangsters broke in her house and killed her son Esulu. Max just got out of jail, but nobody knows where he is. Zenzi is looking for him desperately, although everybody warns her to forget him and start over again with her life.
The point is that Zenzi is sure Max is innocent, and the plot of Unseen has explained it clearly. She ends up killing many of the evil people around her while trying to discover the truth. The gangsters even ask her to kill for money. Still, she’s only motivated by her goals: finding Max and understanding what happened.
Slowlyl while the plot evolves, we understand the events that transformed Zenzi’s life: Yazid was a man who collected evidence of a bank scam the crime syndicate was perpetrating on ordinary people; he intended to use this evidence to blackmail one of the crime bosses, but he gets killed for this. Blessing, the gangster of the area, demands Max take responsibility for that murder, so the police won’t look after him. In exchange, they will economically take care of his family, Zenzi and Elusu. Reluctantly, Max accepts and goes to jail, hiding the truth from Zenzi.
The problems arise when Max discovers from the prison that Blessing is not respecting his part of the deal. Furious, he threatens Blessing to reveal all the truth about Yazid. As a reaction, Blessing orders his team to break into Zenzi’s house and scare her as a message to Max. But things go south, and they kill the kid, Elusu.
Max goes out of jail and, without involving Zenzi (who’s looking for him), goes to the small town of Caledon, where Yazid was, to collect the evidence he had. He wants to take down the whole scam. Meanwhile, Zenzi is doing everything to find Max, killing many gangsters going after her.
Let’s have the ending of Unseen explained: Max is dead after a shooting with the police. Zenzi is caught, and believing it’s all over, she almost confesses. But the crime syndicate is scared of what she could tell the police, so they ask a couple of corrupt police officers to take her out of the police station and kill her. Zenzi manages to escape and decides to take her personal revenge against Raymond, the gangster who fired the shot that killed her son Elusu. Raymond is in the club, tortured by Theron, the crime lawyer. Theron cannot let Raymond go, he suspects him to be responsible for all deaths, and he cannot believe Raymond’s version about a “normal cleaning lady who killed all those big gangsters.”
Zenzi finds Raymond tied in the club and kills him, leaving him there while the club burns down. After that, she feels it’s really over: Max and Elusu are dead, and the police want to arrest her, so she heads to the roof of the building, intending to take her own life. Her sister Naledi and Detective Morkel find her and try to make her change her mind. But Zenzi recalls her tough childhood with a violent father, and realizing her life is desperate, she steps into the void.
Does Zenzi die? We don’t see it with our eyes, the ending of Unseen hasn’t explained it explicitly, but we see her stepping forward over the edge of the building, and with that frame, the series intends to tell us that she wants to die. If that happens, the crime syndicate probably won’t be caught: Zenzi’s revenge would end with the deaths of all the gangsters close to Max. But if you want to know more about Zenzi’s destiny, you may have the answer below, from the story Unseen is based on.
Netflix’s Unseen is based on Fatma: everything you need to know
Netflix TV show Unseen is not based on a true story or a book. The inspiration comes from Fatma, a Turkish series released on Netflix in 2021, directed by Özer Feyzioğlu and Özgür Önürme. Fatma has the same plot, with the protagonist (Fatma) working as a cleaning lady and killing the gangsters who ruined her life.
How is the ending of Fatma, the original series that inspired Unseen? Even in Fatma, the protagonist jumps off the building. But in the last scene, we see her moving her hand and opening her eyes: she’s not dead. Unseen decided to cut the ending before showing Zenzi’s destiny, leaving the viewers in doubt. Zenzi could still be alive, though, as is Fatma in the series it’s based on. And that could leave the possibility of a Season 2, eventually.
