In The Girlfriend you can never fully trust what you see on the screen, and the plot needs to be explained: who’s the real villain, Laura or Cherry?
The Girlfriend, the new series on Amazon Prime, definitely has a particularly intriguing narrative mode that kept us glued to the screen until the very last scene. It’s not just one of those shows where, at some point, the meaning of what you’ve seen suddenly changes—as there are so many of those by now. From the very first episode, we know for certain that what we see is tainted by the perspective of one of the two female leads, Laura and Cherry. We’re never sure whether what we’re watching are the objective facts, or the way one or the other perceives them, we often see the events replayed from the other perspective, and they appear very different.
On the one hand, this puts us on alert from the very beginning and keeps our doubts alive, episode after episode. On the other hand, even when we reach the ending, we still feel the need for what we’ve seen in The Girlfriend to be explained. What really happened, what are the actual facts? Who is the real psycho in The Girlfriend—Cherry or Laura? And how did things really unfold? Let’s try to bring some order to it all.
The Girlfriend ending explained & the plot twist
As we watch the plot of The Girlfriend unfold, we’re always aware that we’re seeing things from the perspective of either Laura or Cherry. Their name even appears in full screen whenever the point of view shifts. In the later episodes, however, the perspective seems to stop: we see Laura doing questionable things, like drugging her own son to keep him from leaving her house, but we also hear Cherry’s mother confirm that her daughter pushed her father into the void years earlier, leaving him paralyzed. We get the feeling that we’re about to discover an alternate version of events, but up until the very last scene, we never truly know who the real villain is.
Then, in the final episode, tragedy strikes: Daniel, disoriented from the drugs, ends up killing his mother Laura in the pool while trying to break up her fight with Cherry. This momentarily prevents us from understanding who the real villain truly is, and the story jumps forward a year, where we see Daniel and Cherry married, Cherry pregnant, and Daniel’s father living with them, in a situation of apparent peace.
By pure chance, however, Daniel finds Laura’s phone, which had slipped under a piece of furniture during her fight with Cherry a year earlier. On it is the recording of the conversation between Laura and Cherry’s mother—the very words Laura had so desperately wanted Daniel to hear. Daniel ends up listening to them a year later, and the revelation shocks even us: we discover that the objective facts were even darker than the perspective we’d seen until then, which already cast Cherry in a bad light. In the recording, Cherry’s mother warns Laura, advising her to stay away from her daughter, describing her as dangerous and capable of making life impossible for anyone who stands in her way. She made her father an invalid, ruined the lives of others in the past, and will stop at nothing. Daniel hears the objective facts for the first time in his life, finally realizes that his mother’s concerns were justified, and begins to wonder what will become of his own life from that moment on.
The ending, in The Girlfriend, confirms that Cherry is truly a dangerous psychopath. At the same time, questions remain about how distorted the perspective was that made Laura appear to be the villain, and what the objective facts actually are.
What are the facts?
It’s worth asking some direct questions and answering them based on what we see in the series.
Yes, this is a fact confirmed by her mother in both perspectives. We also know she did it in a fit of hatred. That’s why her father has no intention of forgiving her, after she ruined his life forever.
Yes, these are also facts, confirmed in both perspectives. Cherry is even arrested for the gallery break-in.
There’s no certainty about this, but it is a fact, and everything suggests that Cherry is the only one who could have both the motive and the means to carry out such an act.
We’ll never know this—viewers only see that incident from Cherry’s perspective. It’s unclear what motive Cherry would have to put her own boyfriend’s life at risk, since she actually wants to keep him under her control. However, as we’ve seen multiple times, there are many situations in which Daniel’s behavior annoys her, so there could be several pretexts for a moment of uncontrolled anger.
For a complete overview: in the book from which the series is adapted, The Girlfriend by Michelle Frances, the accident unfolds differently, and it’s revealed at the end of the book that Cherry was responsible. However, the writers of the Amazon Prime series chose to leave this aspect ambiguous for the viewers, and that’s just one example of the many differences between the book and the series.
Let’s now turn to analyzing Laura’s behavior, asking ourselves which of her actions were actual facts.
Yes, this is a fact confirmed in both perspectives. We understand her real motivations, knowing how far Laura was willing to go to protect her son from what she perceived as a serious threat, especially after discovering that the two were planning to get married.
We can’t be certain. It’s possible, as an extreme act by Laura against Cherry’s continual sabotage, but it’s also possible that Cherry posted the message herself. After all, the content of that message perfectly reflects Cherry’s worldview.
This is probably true, and it’s also justified by Laura’s personal history: having lost a daughter in the past, Laura truly cannot live without Daniel and is constantly worried about his well-being. This concern intensifies after Cherry appears, posing a real threat to Daniel and the entire family. Laura herself admits she needs help by the end of the series. Laura’s suspicions of Cherry were all justified, but it’s also true that her protectiveness toward her son Daniel borders on unhealthy, due to her traumatic past.
Here it’s reasonable to have doubts. It’s possible that it happened, as an extreme act to ensure that Daniel would eventually (perhaps the next morning) listen to the recording on her phone. But it’s also possible that what we see never actually happened. In the book, things unfold differently, and those who have read it might even suspect that in the series it was Cherry herself who drugged Daniel before he went to Laura’s house. In any case, viewers of The Girlfriend on Amazon Prime are left in doubt.
The Girlfriend makes us question practically everything, so it becomes extremely important to have the actual facts clearly explained. Overall, we can be sure that Cherry is a dangerous person who has harmed many people in the past and always gotten away with it, and by the end of the series, Daniel finally becomes aware of this. Laura appears to us as a mother with a painful past and an overprotective tendency toward Daniel that many might see as excessive. In reality, however, Laura does everything she can to be a good mother and keep her extreme tendencies under control. Things obviously become difficult to manage when a real threat like Cherry appears, especially after Cherry’s manipulations make it so that no one believes Laura anymore. What Laura does, then, can reasonably be seen as desperate—but necessary—to protect the son she loves.
