Just One Look Ending, Explained: Who Planted the Photo?

In Netflix’s ‘Just One Look,’ a woman’s life unravels when she comes across a picture that opens a fifteen-year-old can of worms. The protagonist is a woman named Greta, who is haunted by a traumatic event that happened about a decade-and-a-half ago. It was so traumatic that Greta doesn’t have any memories of it anymore. However, she does know that it was at a concert where a fire led to a stampede, which resulted in the death of many people. However, that was a long time ago. Now, Greta is married to a man named Jacek, and they have two beautiful kids together. After they return from a vacation, she decides to get some photos developed. When she gets them, she finds a different photo in the stack, one she has never seen before.

Interestingly, the photo has her husband in it, but when she asks him about it, he dodges the question. Before they can have a conversation on the matter, Jacek leaves the house and doesn’t pick up any of Greta’s calls. When two days pass, and there is no sign of her husband, she goes to the cops, which turns out to be the right move because, unbeknownst to her, Jacek has been kidnapped and is not in good condition. The plot also focuses on a prosecutor named Borys Gajewicz, who discovers that his daughter, Alex, did not die in a hit-and-run but was killed. This revelation comes from the man who ran her down.

Borys seeks out Greta because he has received the same photo she did. He reveals that his daughter is in the picture with Jacek. He invites Greta to join her in the investigation with him, but she has too much going on to trust a strange man. Over the course of six episodes, the story takes one turn after another, but in the end, the truth finally comes to light, and it is utterly heartbreaking. SPOILERS AHEAD.

Does Jacek Die? Why did He Run Away After He Saw the Photo?

Even though Greta and Jacek were married for ten years, there was little to nothing she knew about her husband’s family. She chalked up his desire not to talk about them as his way of moving on from the bad stuff in his life before they met. She never pushes him to talk about it, mainly because she is not concerned with his past and doesn’t want its shadow to affect their relationship. Moreover, she sympathizes with the idea of not wanting to talk about one’s past traumas because she has enough trauma of her own, and she hates it when people bring it up repeatedly. This is why, even in ten years of marriage, Greta doesn’t really know her husband, and, in the end, this proves fatal not just to their relationship but also to Jacek.

The truth is that Jacek wasn’t really Jacek. Fifteen years ago, there was a band with four members: Jacek, Alex, Szymon, and Sylwia. The night of the concert, Jacek died, and Szymon took over his identity. He didn’t come up with this idea by himself. In fact, Jacek’s sister, Sandra, asked him to do it. The thing is that their band was in conflict with a singer named Jimmy over a song that Jacek believed Jimmy had stolen from them. On the night of the concert, Jacek confronted Jimmy about it, but their tussle ended up with the former getting fatally stabbed. Sandra was on the scene when her brother was taking his last breaths. However, she decided not to tell anyone about it.

Sandra knew that once Jacek was declared dead, all of his assets, including the royalties for the songs he made with his band, would go to their father, with whom she did not have a good relationship. She was also aware that an artist’s death could push the narrative surrounding them, leading to an increase in sales, which would mean even more royalties, but none that would come into Sandra’s hands. To stop her father from getting that money, Sandra decided to have Szymon take over her brother’s identity, believing that none would be the wiser. In return for this, she offered Szymon the money he needed to treat his sick mother.

For years, Szymon kept up the facade of being Jacek. But then, when the photo arrives on his doorstep, he is forced to take stock of his life. He decides that he doesn’t want to live as Jacek anymore and wants to come clean to his wife. When he tells Sandra about it, she is infuriated. She has Szymon kidnapped, and the kidnapper beats him to a pulp repeatedly. Eventually, Szymon is found and rescued, but by then, he has sustained too much damage to make it out alive. He spends a few days in the hospital and is conscious enough to confess to his wife and apologize to her. However, his body gives up, and he dies on his hospital bed. The only consolation he has is that he died with a soul free of guilt and secrets.

What Happens to Sandra? Does She Go to Prison?

While Szymon did the wrong thing by taking over Jacek’s identity and lying to everyone around him, he wasn’t the one to be entirely blamed for it. It was the real Jacek’s sister, Sandra, who came up with this plan. She was driven by pure greed and didn’t even seem to care that her brother had died. But that’s not what makes her worse. In the beginning, she successfully convinced the entire band to go forward with her plan. Over the years, however, different band members started to have doubts, beginning with Alex. When Sandra thought that she might tell someone about it, she decided to have her killed and made it look like a hit-and-run.

Years later, Sylwia, who had become a congresswoman now, felt compelled to tell the truth, but she was scared of Sandra. Still, she decided to use a different name and publish a story under the pseudonym to get the truth out. However, Sandra found out about it and had Sylwia killed before she could tell a soul about the night of the concert. This left Szymon, whom Sandra needed to keep alive because, on paper, he was Jacek, and hence, it was necessary for her to get the royalties. This is why, instead of having him killed, she had him kidnapped, hoping that she would be able to threaten him into changing his mind.

Apart from all these murders, there was another thing Sandra was responsible for. To cover up Jacek’s death at the concert, she needed a diversion. So, she started a fire, which then caused a stampede, leading to the deaths of many more people. Moreover, she had Wiktor Lewinski take the fall for it, and the poor guy spent fifteen years in prison. When he came out, he thought he would get a chance to talk to the media and speak for his innocence without implicating Sandra. Instead, she hands him over to Karol, who is still grieving the death of his son, Rafal, who died in the stampede.

When her husband dies, Greta decides to make Sandra pay for it. She confronts the woman at her office and records the entire conversation. While Sandra doesn’t say anything to incriminate herself, there is still enough evidence for the cops to arrest her, especially with her connection to the kidnapper and the money from her dead brother’s royalties that she had been siphoning all these years. In the end, she is apprehended by the cops, showing that justice has finally been served and the real culprit behind all the pain and trauma caused to so many people has received their due.

Did Borys Gajewicz Know the Truth? Who Clicked the Photo?

With the mystery of Jacek’s death and the concert fire solved, the only question that remains is who started it all. The problems in Greta’s life began with the arrival of her husband and his band’s photo fifteen years ago, but she doesn’t know who planted it for her to find. It isn’t until two months after her husband’s death that the truth comes to light. It turns out that former prosecutor Borys Gajewicz planted the photo. When convicted killer Marek confessed to killing Alex in a hit-and-run, Borys rummaged through his daughter’s stuff to find her diary in which she had written everything about the night of the concert and how Samantha manipulated all of them to go along with her lies.

It was in the diary that he found the photo in which he put a cross on his daughter’s face to make it seem more suspicious. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to get the truth out on his own, but if he ruffled some feathers, someone might get nervous and make a mistake, and that would be his window to bring the truth to light. That is exactly what happened when Greta and her husband saw the picture. Despite knowing the whole story, he didn’t anticipate the level of damage it would cause. To begin with, he didn’t stop to think about the lengths that Samantha would go to keep her secret and money intact. He didn’t think about the fact that someone might get hurt and that people may die as a consequence of his actions.

Two months later, when he comes clean to Greta, she chides him about it. He could have come forward directly, at least to her, if not the law. But he chose to work from secrecy, and that cost a lot of people their lives, including her husband. She cannot forgive Borys for what he did. However, this does not stop him from pointing out that the picture that started it all was taken by none other than Greta herself. She doesn’t remember it, but back then, she had already broken up with Rafal because she was in love with Szymon. Following the concert, she lost her memories, and Szymon became Jacek. When their paths crossed again a few years later in Paris, Szymon decided to keep her in the dark, and she made it easy by never asking him any questions about his life before her.

Borys shows her that by being the one who took the picture, she had already been in the middle of the drama years before he would even get a hint of what was actually going on with his daughter. His words also spark a memory for Greta, as she remembers being at the concert with Szymon and taking the picture. Since her husband’s disappearance, a lot of her memories of the night were triggered. The final scene with the memory of the photo shows that perhaps, in time, more memories will surface, and she will eventually have all of them back, which would, in a way, also bring Szymon back to her.