Spoiler warning: Spoilers for the full 2025 film adaptation.
Richard killed his wife Anne; Carrie, the woman Lo met in cabin 10, was recruited to impersonate her. The missing passenger is concealed by a change of identity, not by Lo imagining the event she reported.
Why does everyone appear accounted for?
Carrie takes Anne’s place after Richard throws Anne overboard. Richard wants control of the fortune Anne intended to give to charity, and the impersonation allows the voyage to proceed as though she were alive.
Lo has seen a real woman, but the passenger list and the visible household now support a different account. That is what makes her insistence threatening to the people maintaining the substitution.
Her earlier trauma and drinking become convenient reasons to dismiss her. They are not the film’s explanation for what she witnessed.
Why does Carrie turn against Richard?
She agreed to a deception without agreeing to murder. Lo’s intervention also makes her consider whether a man willing to kill his wife will allow his accomplice to leave safely.
At the gala, Lo presents Anne’s intended speech and Carrie confirms it while still appearing to be Anne. The disguise that preserved Richard’s claim becomes a way to contradict him publicly.
Richard attempts to flee, but Sigrid and Lo stop him. Ben, who helped Lo escape the yacht, has already been killed, so the exposure does not leave everyone who assisted her unharmed.
What does the later message confirm?
Carrie sends Lo a video with her child and an invitation to visit. Lo has returned to journalism, publishing the story after Anne’s money is donated.
The message confirms Carrie has a life beyond being someone else’s replacement. Her child also gives that continuation a relationship the impersonation could never honestly contain.
Lo’s success is not simply catching a powerful man. It is keeping the missing woman and the woman used to replace her within the account. Anne’s intentions are honored, Carrie can appear as herself, and Lo’s insistence that something happened is finally allowed to become a report rather than a symptom others can dismiss.
Sources: official ending breakdown.