Warning: Spoilers ahead for Malice
Prime Video’s Malice, a six-episode psychological thriller starring David Duchovny and Jack Whitehall, out on November 14, begins with a sunlit family getaway and morphs into a darker and far more claustrophobic story.
Jamie Tanner (Duchovny) arrives in Greece with his wife and children expecting a normal holiday with their longtime friends, Jules (Christine Adams) and Damien (Raza Jaffrey), only to discover that Jules has brought along a tutor, Adam (Whitehall). He seems overeager, almost too polished, but that energy immediately wins over everyone except Jamie, who seems to be the only one who senses a current under the surface. The show plants that suspicion early, and by the finale it’s clear that Adam didn’t stumble into the Tanner family’s orbit—he engineered the collision.
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As the season unfolds, every inconvenience in Jamie’s life slowly escalates into catastrophe.
Adam’s real motive and why he fixated on Jamie
Jamie eventually pieces together how he’s connected to Adam: years ago, he invested heavily in a small family-run luggage company owned by Colin Tilderman, Adam’s father. Jamie put in €15 million over two years. The problem wasn’t the amount—it was Colin’s inability to pay even a portion of the promised returns. Jamie withdrew his investment, a hard business decision that meant the end of everything for the Tildermans. Their company collapsed, their finances imploded, and Colin disintegrated.
The tragedy that followed defined Adam’s life. His father murdered his mother during a rage-fueled breakdown, swallowed pills, and set the house on fire. Instead of processing that horror, Adam built a mythology: his father was a victim, a good man crushed by wealthier, colder people—men like Jamie. When his sister Sophie tries to tell the real story, Adam refuses to hear it. For him, Jamie is the architect of every loss he ever lived through. That fixation becomes the spine of Malice.
By the finale, we learn that Adam has been living under shifting identities for years, including “Paul Greenson” in Thailand, where he was arrested after a sex worker was murdered. When Damien recognizes the photo from a news clipping, Adam brushes it off, claiming the man is his half-brother. Later conversation with Sophie makes clear that this is another layer of self-invention. The Adam we meet in Greece isn’t a harmless, overeager young man—he’s someone who has shed versions of himself repeatedly, leaving wreckage behind each time.
How Adam slowly dismantles Jamie’s life
From the moment Adam and Jamie go out for drinks in Greece in the first episode, the show begins to reveal Adam’s manipulative ways. He drugs Jamie without his knowledge. He poisons the Tanner family’s dog. What seem like coincidences form a deliberate rhythm, and Adam adjusts his tactics depending on who he needs out of the way. He poisons the Tanners’ longtime nanny to take her role. He manipulates Damien for a job reference and then cruelly dismisses him. His charm drops the moment usefulness ends.
Jamie’s downfall unfolds in waves. After his son Kit’s is arrested and Jamie is accused of sexual misconduct in an email that destroys his workplace reputation, an invasion on his home in London completes the collapse. He has no job, no credibility, and no trust inside his own marriage. His wife Nat (Carice van Houten), overwhelmed and exhausted, takes the children back to Greece alone. Adam, panicking at the thought of losing proximity to the family he’s been studying, flies there ahead of Jamie. He stalks their villa, steals Nat’s phone, and begins monitoring their conversations. When he overhears April and Nat joking about him, something inside Adam shifts. He believes he has been loyal, attentive, good to them in ways Jamie never was. Their laughter becomes, to him, proof that wealthy people use and discard people like him.
By the time Jamie realizes the luggage delivered to his house is a message from Adam, everything clicks into place. The collapse of his life wasn’t cosmic misfortune, it was an orchestrated campaign. That revelation triggers his desperate flight to Greece, where Malice stages its most unnerving sequence.
The Greece confrontation
Jamie arrives in Greece convinced that Adam has taken April and Dexter. When he reaches the landmark Adam texted, he finds the man waiting alone. In a raw and messy confrontation, a man who has lost everything faces a man who believes he never had anything to begin with. Jamie tries to explain what happened with Colin. He tells Adam that Colin failed as a businessman, that him taking his investment out was never personal, that grief has distorted Adam’s view of the past. But Adam isn’t defending facts.
When Nat calls to say she has found the children safe at the beach, Jamie’s anger dissolves into exhaustion. He tells Adam he will walk away, keep quiet, and forget everything if it means keeping his family alive. Adam refuses because walking away has never been the point. Revenge isn’t closure—it’s identity. It’s the only version of himself he has left.
The sudden arrival of Yorgos, the son of Jamie’s neighbor Dimitri, fractures the scene. Yorgos wanders in, confused, asking what has happened. Adam shoots him without hesitation. The horror on Jamie’s face is matched only by Adam’s eerie calm as he explains the plan: he will frame Yorgos for Jamie’s murder and let the story spiral into local tragedy. Seconds later, Adam shoots Jamie in the head. Malice chooses not to sensationalize the moment. It lands with a cold finality—quiet, precise, and irreversible.
Does Adam get away?
The finale jumps forward to Adam’s arrival at an American airport, where Homeland Security pulls him aside. Alerts have been issued internationally in connection with Jamie’s murder, and investigators have noticed inconsistencies in Adam’s account. The man calmly insists he left the Tanners days before the incident and that he was never in Greece again. It’s a rehearsed story, and he delivers it with total composure.
The episode leaves several details deliberately open, but it does show Adam being detained. Authorities have enough suspicion to hold him and enough reason to question his movements—especially since no official travel record places him in Greece at the time of the killing. The implication is clear: Adam traveled illegally, banking on the absence of paper trails to keep him untouchable. But that invisibility works against him now. The lack of documentation makes him look exactly like what he is: a fugitive.
Meanwhile, Nat and her friend, Ingrid, provide investigators with everything they know—Adam’s obsession, his history, his lies about his time in Thailand, his fixation on Jamie’s investments, and the final days leading up to the murder. Whether that will be enough is the question the finale leaves hanging. Surveillance cameras, flight routes, witness sightings, and Damien’s mysterious disappearance all point toward Adam eventually being charged, but Malice resists giving a definitive answer. It ends at the moment where fear meets uncertainty: Adam may finally be cornered, or he may slip through the cracks yet again.
Even once he’s caught, Malice makes clear that Adam doesn’t see himself as a killer. He sees himself as the only person willing to correct a story he believes the world got wrong. The tragedy is that everyone else can see the truth—except the man who caused it.
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