Credit: Netflix

The Body is a coming-of-age psycho-horror drama on Netflix about an all-girls Catholic school dance team, the Lions, whose mock sacrificial ritual and drug-fuelled Halloween initiation ceremony for new recruit Grace spiral dangerously out of control.

While Grace spends most of the season comatose, she wakes up in the final moments of the Netflix drama in the wake of the community’s mass hysteria around her mysterious illness. Although the majority of locals now believe Grace is capable of miracles, Quinn Shephard leaves the true nature of her condition- whether divine intervention, cognitive trauma, or drug reaction- open to interpretation.

With the Lions also concealing a key piece of information that Grace took a substance before falling comatose on the night of her initiation, things are already pretty complicated. And to make things worse, when Anya and Lisbeth discovered Grace, they drove her home instead of taking her to the hospital to avoid getting in trouble for illicit drug use, triggering Anya’s guilt trip for potentially killing Grace.

Just when she grapples with the chaos of dance team members hallucinating Grace’s visions, Anya’s underlying romantic tension with Elise comes to a head, sparking the question: do they finally get together by the end of The Body?

Do Anya and Elise get together at the end of The Body?

Quinn Shephard’s coming-of-age psychological horror thriller The Body plays incredibly with the grey areas, cashing in on the characters’ dominant emotions, whether trauma, guilt, fear, or love, as the lead-up to their respective unravelling. Despite being best friends for the longest time and harbouring unspoken, simmering romantic feelings for each other, Anya and Elise constantly grow distant throughout the instalment.

Since Anya cannot confide in Elise that she drove Grace home that night, potentially leaving her to die, she actively tries to distance herself from Elise, making the latter feel betrayed by her growing proximity to Lisbeth. Although Anya eventually gives in to her uncontrollable desire for Elise, she still continues dating Steven while refusing to kiss Elise on the lips. Then comes the drunken hot tub scene where Anya decides to kiss Elise with Steven present right in front, feigning to rouse him.

This shows Anya is so lost that she’s steadily losing sight of the consequences of her actions. So, when she finds Elise alone later, the latter is understandably crying.

During the debutante ball, the situation slips out of Anya’s hands as trust between her and Lisbeth fades, and Steven mistakenly convinces himself that he’s the one who hurt Grace. This allows Elise to finally connect the dots: Anya drove Grace home that night. But just when viewers think things couldn’t get any more complicated, Elise gets accused of putting Grace’s lifeless body in her bed. Despite knowing everything, Anya asks whether she’s really the culprit.

As a result, Anya and Elise’s final moments together are more heated than one would expect. Elise reveals the truth about Anya to Steven as he fails to recognise the person he thought he loved, making it one of the bitter endings. Needless to say, they don’t end up together.