It Was All in the Reaction Shots
Presumed Innocent pulls off an impressive reveal with carefully deployed clues waiting for the moment their meaning would become clear.
In the end, Presumed Innocent did not land on the murder suspect with the most evidence against them, or the perpetrator from the original source material, or any of its tricksy red herrings, or even Tommy Molto’s cat. Yet in a feat of storytelling, the murderer revealed in the show’s final moments did not come entirely out of the blue. There were hints throughout the Apple TV+ legal drama that pointed in this direction, but they weren’t obvious bits of plot development or startling new pieces of evidence. The bread crumbs left a careful system of emotional clues sitting right there on the surface, waiting for the moment their meaning would become clear.
In both of the original Presumed Innocent texts, the book from 1987 and the film from 1990, Rusty Sabich’s wife, Barbara, is revealed as the killer near the end of the story. Jealous over his affair with his colleague Carolyn, Barbara commits the murder and leaves just enough evidence at the crime scene to suggest that Rusty may have done it, although the book and film have differing interpretations of her intentions for Rusty. But in the TV adaptation, the reveal that Barbara is the murderer is actually the show’s final misdirection. Rusty confronts his wife in the garage where she’s working out, explaining that he’s suspected her from the beginning and now has the evidence to prove it. (He tracked her car to Tommy Molto’s apartment, where the murder weapon had been planted the night before closing arguments.) Then their daughter, Jaden, walks in, and the truth comes out: She killed Carolyn.
It’s an impressive reveal, most importantly because it retains the spirit of the original story without replicating its familiar outcome. The murderer is someone close to Rusty, and ultimately he cares less about finding justice than he does about protecting his family. If the reveal wasn’t working from the established context, though, it wouldn’t land nearly as well. Jaden as the murderer is shocking in a way that feels quickly obvious, and Presumed Innocent doesn’t pull that off with a long trail of physical clues. There are so few physical clues, in fact, that Rusty has to introduce or explain the relevant ones in this scene: He found Carolyn’s body and assumed Barbara killed her, which is why he tried to cover it up and implicate someone else. He knew it had to be Barbara after he tracked her car. But Jaden feels inevitable anyhow, because Presumed Innocent has been laying much more obvious, emotional evidence from the first start.
In the second episode, Rusty comes home from the first big day working on the case, and Jaden’s the one who asks, “How was work today, Dad?” At the dinner table, when Rusty and Barbara start to explain that they need to talk as a family, she’s the anxious one, asking what’s going on and shortly thereafter storming away. She’s the one who keeps poking at Rusty about why he had the affair and in later episodes asking about how the court case will play out and what kind of choices he should make. “It seems like you got a good draw with this judge,” she says in episode three. “Is it good that it’s happening this fast?”
It’s the perfect set of clues because the innocent interpretation is fundamentally the same as the guilty one. She’s very close to Rusty. She worries about him and wants to protect their family. As the series explains all the facts of the case and the new revelations, it turns again and again to reaction shots from Jaden, who stares at Rusty with sadness and frustration. Close-ups of her face punctuate every family conversation. The show measures our feelings about Rusty by weighing them against how Jaden looks at him.
Jaden as the concerned, invested daughter perfectly explains why she would want to know everything that’s going on, and being a concerned, invested daughter is also exactly how she wound up killing Carolyn. There’s no sudden swerve or brand-new revelation that she’s secretly a monster, and she doesn’t have to be experiencing the dissociation she brings up as a way to talk about the fact that her father might be a murderer, either. The show presents her clearly from the start, and that emotional consistency handily explains all of her deeply concerned reaction shots both before and after we know she’s the killer.
There are a few times when the show almost gives away the game, though. When law enforcement comes to search the house in the second episode, she asks Rusty, “Why are they taking my computer?” with a note of panic that’s just a little too alarmed. “Dad, it’s mine.” Later in the season, this might have been too obvious, but buried as it is so early in the story, with all the other big developments and red herrings still there to help us forget, one little moment where a teenager is angry about her laptop getting taken doesn’t send up much of a red flag.
But the best Jaden-did-it bread crumb is right at the beginning. She is the one who hands Rusty the phone when it starts to ring, with an attentiveness to his work life that could look like politeness but appears much more fraught in retrospect. Rusty takes the call and starts listening to what he’s being told, then reels into the house, apparently stunned. He starts to explain to Barbara what’s happening; they’re both standing inside the kitchen in a darkened foreground. There in the bright background, suspiciously in focus and framed neatly between the two of them, is Jaden.
It’s not a lot! It’s not giving away the game, certainly, unless you already know what you’re looking for. The pleasure of Presumed Innocent is that it lays just enough groundwork so that the final reveal immediately makes sense from a place of character development, even if you have to do a little hand waving for all the plot mechanics to fit into place. (How exactly did Rusty have the stuff to tie Carolyn up like that — on such short notice?) The emotional logic tracks, which is ultimately what makes for the most satisfying ending. Plus plenty of screen time for Tommy’s cat! What more could you want?
Related