What happens at the end of Unfaithful? The studio shot six endings before Adrian Lyne got his way
Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful (2002) closes on a shot that refuses to answer its own question — a car idling at a traffic light, going nowhere. Getting to that image involved a proper fight between the director and 20th Century Fox, and a stack of alternative endings shot just in case.
Spoilers ahead for a 24-year-old thriller, cause manners, darling.
What actually happens
Connie Sumner (Diane Lane) has been having an affair with French book dealer Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez). Her husband Edward (Richard Gere) finds out, visits Paul's loft — and when he spots the snow globe he once gave Connie sitting on Paul's shelf, he snaps and kills him with it. He rolls the body in a rug and dumps it.
Connie pieces together what Edward has done. Instead of destroying them, the shared guilt pulls the marriage back together: she burns the evidence of the affair, and the two close ranks as the police circle.
That final scene
In the last shot, Connie, Edward, and their son sit in the car at a red light, at night, in the rain — directly outside a police station. Edward talks about handing himself in; they also talk about simply disappearing, starting again in Mexico. The light changes. The car doesn't move. Fade out.
Do they confess or run? Lyne never says — and that was entirely the point.
The six-endings fight
According to Variety in May 2002, six possible endings were reportedly shot on location in Tarrytown, New York. The dispute boiled down to two camps: Fox wanted a neat, morally tidy finish in which everything was resolved; Lyne wanted the ambiguous ending, closely echoing Claude Chabrol's 1968 French film La Femme infidèle, on which Unfaithful is based. Test screenings settled it — focus groups sided with the ambiguity, and Fox reversed course before the film's 10 May 2002 release.
One of the discarded endings survives among the 11 deleted scenes on the DVD.
"The final images are breathtaking and worth the wait," critic Derek Winnert wrote in his review, arguing the film rewards the patience it asks for.
Did the gamble pay off?
Handsomely. Unfaithful took $119.1 million worldwide against a $50 million budget, and Diane Lane's performance earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Lyne, for his part, didn't direct another film for 20 years — until Deep Water in 2022.