5 Clues That Hinted At That Woman In The House Plot Twist All Along

Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers from The Woman in the House finale. When a show has a title as ridiculous as The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, you know you’re in for some truly wild twists and turns. And of course, Netflix’s new murder mystery spoof did just that, with a finale twist that nobody saw coming. Well... maybe not *nobody*. If you were paying close attention throughout the seven episodes leading up to the finale, you might have picked up some clues that Emma was the murderer in The Woman in the House all along.

Like any good psychological thriller, The Woman in the House constantly made viewers think a different character was the one who murdered flight attendant Lisa... who actually turned out to really be a con woman named Chastity. At first, all the evidence pointed to her temperamental boyfriend Neil, then it seemed like her accomplice Rex backstabbed her. At one point, even Anna was convinced she herself had somehow murdered Lisa while out of it on her wine and meds, and then Douglas’ big reveal about Buell’s bloody past made the handyman the prime suspect.

With all that speculation going around, it was easy to miss the real murderer: Neil’s sweet-seeming daughter, Emma.

A big reason why this reveal was so surprising was because it felt really random. Emma didn’t really have any motive for her murders other than just being annoyed by people close to her. Since she clearly has no hesitation about murdering people willy-nilly, there aren’t a lot of super obvious clues pointing to Emma’s pattern, but there are a few that jump out once you remember her earlier scenes.

1. Emma was present at all the murder scenes.

Initially, Neil is the prime suspect since he was present at his wife Meredith’s drowning, Ms. Patrick’s lethal fall, and Lisa’s murder. But someone else was at all those instances too: Emma. While there were a ton of other people at the lighthouse when Ms. Patrick was pushed off, Emma was the only other person besides Neil to be with Meredith at the lake and in Neil’s home the night of Lisa’s murder.

2. Neil makes ominous comments about Emma.

Neil’s comments about Emma take on a whole new meaning after you know the truth. When he first tells Anna about Meredith’s drowning, he mentions that Emma saw the whole thing happen. Later, it’s clear she obviously saw it happen since she orchestrated it. Then, when Anna is surprised to see Neil at Lisa’s funeral after he found out she was conning him, Neil gestures to Emma and says, “She’s the reason we’re here.” He has no idea how right he is about that.

3. Emma is immediately cold toward Carol.

At first, Emma seems as sweet as the chocolate bars she’s selling door-to-door, but she does display a bit of her coldness upon first meeting Anna by bluntly declaring she thinks Carol is a bad person. Her manipulative tendencies are also on display as she coerces Anna into buying multiple boxes of chocolate out of guilt.

4. Emma is obsessed with ducks.

Emma’s favorite animal may also be a nod toward her first couple murders, both of which involved water. She pushed Ms. Patrick off a lighthouse into the sea, and rigged a pier to collapse into a lake when her mom stepped on it. Her love of ducks more specifically points to how she drowned her mom, since ducks are associated with ponds like the one Meredith was murdered in, and the scheme relied on Emma’s swimming prowess to pull off.

5. The source material laid it all out.

The Woman in the House is spoofing a whole genre of movies, but it very clearly has one film in its crosshairs more than any other: 2021’s film adaptation of The Woman in the Window. Anyone who watched that thriller probably recognized the Emma twist right away. The Woman in the Window also ended with the reveal that the neighbor’s sweet-seeming kid was the murderer all along.

The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window is streaming on Netflix now.