The Guest List

The wedding reaches its climax during the reception on the storm-battered island. Tensions that have been building all day finally erupt: Jules overhears Olivia and Will arguing and realizes Will has been having an affair with her own sister and that he lied to her about who he really is. Johnno learns that Will secretly cut him out of the television deal they had pitched together as partners. When the storm knocks out the power, chaos descends on the reception, and in the darkness a scream rings out. When the lights come back on, a waiter finds Will's body on the shoreline — he has been stabbed to death.

In the panic that follows, suspicion spreads across the guest list, since nearly everyone present has a motive: Olivia, whom Will seduced online under the fake name Steve before abandoning her and blackmailing her into silence after she became pregnant and had an abortion alone; Hannah, who has just realized that Will was the university boyfriend who leaked intimate videos of her sister Alice, driving her to suicide; and Johnno, who has spent years consumed by guilt over the death of a bullied schoolmate nicknamed Darcey, a death he and Will caused together through a cruel boarding-school game called "Survival" and never owned up to.

The truth is eventually revealed: the killer is Aoife, the wedding planner who runs the island venue with her husband Freddy. Aoife is Darcey's sister. She deliberately lured Will to the island by offering the couple a steep discount on the venue, hoping that confronting him would bring her some kind of closure over her brother's death. When she realized Will felt no remorse whatsoever for his role in Darcey's death, she killed him in an act of long-delayed vengeance.

In the aftermath, Johnno initially tries to take the blame for the murder, driven by his own guilt over Darcey and a sense that he deserves to be punished. Jules and Olivia, estranged for years, begin to reconcile and grow close again. Hannah and Charlie leave the island shaken and uncertain about their marriage after Charlie admits he had an affair with Jules. Hannah and Aoife, bound by the shared grief of losing a sibling to Will's cruelty, find a measure of solace in knowing that their siblings' deaths have finally been avenged.