‘Loving Adults’ Ending Explained – Does Leonora Let Christian Go?

By Marc Miller
Published: August 27, 2022 (Last updated: 2 weeks ago)
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Loving Adults Image for Ending Explained Article
'Loving Adults' (Credit - Netflix)

WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS

Here is the deal with Loving Adults. Christian (Darin Salim) and Leonora (Sonja Richter) may be a power couple, but they have grown apart for years. They have a son who has been ill for a decade or more. She quit her dream of playing the violin professionally to care for him. He donated a piece of his spinal cord so his son could walk and brought home the money to pay for his medical needs.

Luckily, Christian started a construction company that became highly successful, and they are now well off. To make things even sweeter, their son has made such progress that he is close to being cured. (Don’t try to decipher specific details, the film doesn’t go there). 

However, they have grown apart, and he is having an affair with his star architect. Leonora is awoken by her husband’s phone. It’s vibrating and buzzing like a chainsaw and lighting up like a Christmas tree. She demands to see who it is and offers a lame excuse that it’s work. Before she can take it from his hands and look at the texts, he throws the phone against the wall, destroying it.

Smart move because he meets his lover the next day, who demands he break up with his wife because she wants kids. After some investigating, Leonora finds a profile of the mistress and catches them having sex in a Christian business partner’s office. She even looks up and makes eye contact with Leonora. 

Christian tells his wife the next day that he wants a divorce, but Leonora mentions the affair. She threatens him not to take all his money, and he wants to give her what she has earned. She threatens to go to the police officers because she helped him commit fraud, which set up his company for success. Leonora says they had a deal.

She takes care of their child, he works, and they spend their lives together. Leonora forces Christian to call his little tart to break up with her on speaker phone, and when he’s about to, he hangs up the phone.

Christian tells her he has never loved anyone like his mistress before and will not break up with her. She kicks him out and, when he does some investigating, finds out his wife once was accused of pushing her high school boyfriend off a cliff but was never charged. He is between a rock and another very sharp rock. He can either leave his wife, which means he will go to jail, or stay with her and be unhappy forever. 

But there is a third option. He grabs a white van from his company’s lot. His wife is an avid runner, and he knows her routine. He heads home, sees her jogging with her red jacket on with the hood over her head, and runs her over. Christian then backs up and hits her again. He returns the van after washing it. Christian makes sure the cleaning staff sees him at work. He drives home, and when he arrives, the man is in for the shock of his life — Leonora is there.

Christian ran over the wrong woman, a mother of three. His wife finds out later it was Christian and that he intended to kill her. And instead of turning him in, she is blackmailing him into killing his lover, or she will turn him in. She even coaches him on how, since Leonora admits to him, she killed her high school boyfriend for cheating on her. Yes, she is an expert on the subject matter. 

Leonora thinks she has the whole thing planned out. They spend a weekend at a hotel, and while he sneaks out to commit murder, she is in ordering all sorts of things from the hotel by phone. All while implying Christian is in the room with her. When room service is delivered, she plays a prerecorded message of him telling her where his wallet is on speaker phone so that the waiter can hear it. Leonora even times a text from Christian’s phone to his lover, breaking up with her. By that time, he is in her home, and before she can look at her cell, he grabs her, and they kiss.

When it becomes apparent to Leonora that Christian has changed his mind, she sneaks into his lover’s home through a window. While she is in the bathroom, Leonora stabs her in the back. She tells him, “I know you couldn’t do it.” Christan takes his dead lover into his arms and holds her. The next day, the cops cannot find the body, and when they question the Loving Adults, they both admit to affairs, and she knows about his. They put the body in the middle of a floating bomb fire in the middle of the lake. The couple discards the bones later.

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