Netflix’s "His & Hers" opens like a familiar psychological whodunit but ends somewhere far more unsettling.
The six-episode limited series, adapted from Alice Feeney’s novel and created by William Oldroyd, stars Tessa Thompson as Anna Andrews, a once-prominent news reporter, opposite Jon Bernthal as Jack Harper, a small-town detective.
Once married and now estranged, the two are pulled back into each other’s lives when a woman is found murdered in the woods near their sleepy hometown of Dahlonega, Georgia.
The victim is Rachel Hopkins (Jamie Tisdale), a former high-school friend of Anna’s. Her death immediately raises questions, especially when it’s revealed that Jack had been having an affair with Rachel the night before she was killed. As Anna pushes to cover the case as a field reporter and Jack leads the investigation, both find themselves under suspicion, locked in a tense game of truth-telling and omission.
Then, more women from Anna’s past turn up dead: Helen Wang (Poppy Liu) and Zoe (Marin Ireland), each murder marked with friendship bracelets from their teenage years.
Te series frames its central question clearly: Who killed Rachel, and which woman finally snapped?
What Happened to Rachel in High School?
By the finale, the show makes clear it was never about who lost control. It was about who remembered the past and decided to act on it.
That past begins on Anna’s 16th birthday.
Anna, Rachel, Zoe, and Helen were once a tight-knit high-school friend group, inseparable on the surface. That night, under the guise of a celebration, Rachel, the group’s ringleader, lured Anna and an awkward outsider named Catherine Kelly (Astrid Rotenberry) into the woods.
What began as teenage cruelty escalated into something far darker. Older men were brought in. Photos were taken. Catherine managed to escape. Anna didn’t. She was sexually assaulted while the girls she trusted stood by and watched.
The trauma was buried for years, and the girls never told anyone.
Catherine, meanwhile, reinvents herself through massive weight loss and plastic surgery.
Years later, she returns to town under a new name, Lexi Jones (Rebecca Rittenhouse), as a polished, ambitious news anchor who takes over Anna’s job during her absence. Her reappearance ties the violence of the past directly to the present-day investigation, making her a natural suspect, even though she isn’t responsible for the murders.
Who Killed Rachel, Zoe and Helen?
It isn’t until decades later, after Anna loses her three-month-old daughter to sudden infant death syndrome, a tragedy that shatters her marriage and sends her into a year-long disappearance, that the truth fully resurfaces.
While going through old tapes and mementos, Anna’s mother, Mrs. Andrews, discovers footage from that night in the woods and realizes what really happened to her daughter.
For a woman already grieving the loss of her granddaughter and watching her daughter fall apart, the discovery becomes a breaking point.
The series ultimately reveals that Mrs. Andrews is the killer. She fakes dementia to move unnoticed and uses spare keys from her years working as a house cleaner to methodically kill Rachel, Helen, and Zoe, the women she believes destroyed Anna’s life. Each murder is marked by a friendship bracelet, transforming symbols of teenage loyalty into reminders of betrayal.
When Anna reads her mother’s confession in the finale, her reaction is what makes the ending so chilling. She cries and then smiles. She doesn’t turn her mother in. She doesn’t confront her. She accepts what was had been done for her.
Anna then makes her own choice. She never tells Jack the full truth about the woods and that she, not Catherine, had been sexually assaulted. She allows the safer version of the story to stand. And she raises Zoe’s daughter, knowing her own mother killed Zoe, reframing the murder as a twisted attempt to give Anna back the family she lost.
By the final moments, Anna has everything she once wanted: her career, a future, a family.
But it’s built on silence.
"His & Hers" doesn’t end by solving a crime. It ends by asking a far darker question, one that lingers long after the credits roll: If the truth only causes more pain, is it still worth telling, or is survival its own form of justice?
