‘Sharper’ Ending Explained: Everyone Is a Con Artist in Julianne Moore’s New Apple Movie

If Sharper—the new Julianne Moore movie that began streaming on Apple TV+ today—teaches you anything, let it be to never lone someone you just met $350,000. They are almost certainly scamming you. Unfortunately for Justice Smith’s character in this new movie, he learns that lesson the hard way.

Directed by Benjamin Caron, with a screenplay by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka, Sharper is all about the art of the con. By the end of the movie—which also stars Sebastian Stan, Briana Middleton, and John Lithgow—you won’t know who to trust. That’s all fun and games… until you’re left totally confused as to who was conning who, and what, exactly, is going on.

If those twists and turns had your head spinning, don’t worry, because Decider is here to help. Read on for a thorough breakdown of the Sharper movie plot twist and the Sharper movie ending explained. Fair warning: Major Sharper spoilers lie ahead!

Sharper movie plot summary:

The movie begins with a meet-cute between Tom (Justice Smith), a bookseller, and Sandra (Briana Middleton), a graduate student who comes to Tom’s shop looking for a book. Tom asks Sandra out, and though she dithers at first, she agrees to grab dinner with him at “a little Japanese restaurant on Mott Street.”

Tom and Sandra fall into a whirlwind romance, which, from the outside, seems pretty perfect. We learn that Tom is coming out of an intense bout of depression. We also learn that Sandra grew up in foster care and that her troubled foster brother often hits her up for money. One day, Sandra tells Tom her brother is in serious trouble—he owes some scary dudes $350,000, and if he doesn’t pay up, they’re going to kill him. Tom tells Sandra he can get her the money. Surprise! He secretly has a super-rich father. (That explains why he’s able to own an independent bookstore!)

Tom gets Sandra the cash. Sandra goes to make the drop-off, insisting that Tom stay behind because she doesn’t want him caught up in this. Aw, how sweet. It’s less sweet when she stands Tom up for their date at the Japanese restaurant and instead runs off with his money. Yep, Tom just totally got conned.

At this point, the movie switches to Sandra’s point of view, and we learn how she became a con artist. As it turns out, she is a drug addict and an ex-convict who was recruited by a con man Max (Sebastian Stan). Max gives her money and a place to stay, so long as Sandra agrees to help him pull off a con. He trains her to become the woman that Tom met: A shy, bookish graduate student who has studied in Italy and has an abusive foster brother. Sandra seems to fall for Max in the process, but Max is already romantically involved.

And that brings us to Max’s point of view. Max is, apparently, the troubled, spoiled son of a wealthy woman named Madeline (Julianne Moore). Max tries an easy scam on Madeline’s new boyfriend, a wealthy man named Richard (John Lithgow), but Madeline calls him out on it. Seeing how much distress Max is causing Madeline, Richard offers to pay Max to stay away from his new girlfriend. But plot twist alert: Madeline is a con artist too. She’s not Max’s mom, she’s his lover. Together, they’ve conned poor Richard out of a boatload of money. After the job is done, Max expects Madeline to leave Richard and run away with him. But she’s gotten comfortable in her life as a soon-to-be-trophy-wife, and decides to stay with Richard, now that he’s proposed. Max is furious. He decides to pull a con over on Richard’s son—who, plot twist alert, is Tom, aka Justice Smith—to get his revenge.

Are you ready for yet another point-of-view switch? In Madeline’s world, things couldn’t be better. Richard dies, leaving almost his entire fortune to Madeline. The one thing he leaves to his son Tom is his charitable foundation. He also makes Madeline a trustee on the foundation’s board, meaning that she would take over if anything happens to Tom. Madeline and Tom are awkwardly living together in Richard’s house, and Madeline is not-so-subtly trying to get Tom to move out. But then something terrible (for Madeline) happens: Tom tracks down Sandra, the woman who scammed him.

Tom brings a drugged-out Sandra home to watch over her while she detoxes. Sandra is lucid enough to tell Madeline she knows exactly who she is. Sandra tells Madeline she wants to see Max, who ditched her the same way Madeline ditched Max. Sandra threatens to expose Madeline as a con woman unless she sets up a meeting with Max. Madeline and Sandra meet Max in an abandoned parking lot. But, to Madeline’s surprise, Tom crashes the meeting, along with his security team who helped track down Sandra.

Sharper movie ending explained:

Tom reveals he knows Madeline conned him out of his inheritance, and loses his cool a bit, to say the least. He points a gun at Madeline and seems prepared to shoot. Sandra darts forward and knocks the gun out of his hands. Madeline lunges for the gun, grabs it, and points it at Tom. Tom goads Madeline, telling her to do it—and then he does it for her. He walks forward, pushes the gun in Madeline’s hand to his chest, and then forces her to pull the trigger. He falls back into a pool of his own blood.

One of Tom’s security guys declares Tom dead, and turns to Madeline: “You killed him.” Madeline protests that Tom killed himself, and Max comes to her defense. Madeline, panicking that she is about to go to prison, offers to give all of the inheritance money back in exchange for a cover-up. She calls up her lawyer on the spot and has him transfer all of her money to the charitable foundation. In return, Tom’s security team makes his death look like a robbery.

Madeline, Max, and Sandra board a plane to get the hell out of there. Madeline tells Max she didn’t really lose any money—she transferred her inheritance to the foundation, but with Tom dead, she is now the person in charge of the foundation. Sandra, disgusted by the fact that her two companions are still talking about money, runs to the plane bathroom, seemingly to be sick.

Sharper movie plot twist explained:

Are you ready for this? Tom’s not dead! Madeline realizes that Tom is still alive when she idly wipes at Tom’s blood on her sleeve, and it comes right out. Blood doesn’t come out that easily, so it must not be blood. And that means Tom is alive. And that means he is still in charge of the foundation. And that means Madeline did, in fact, lose all of her money.

At first, Madeline accuses Max of setting her up. But then she realizes Sandra never came back from the plane bathroom. It wasn’t Max who orchestrated the final con—it was Sandra. In the movie’s final sequence, from the point of view of “Sandy,” we see that Sandra really did fall for Tom, and she confessed everything to him after pulling the scam. Sandra, Tom, and Tom’s “security team”—who are actually con men that Sandra met from her days of conning with Max— devised their own scam, in order to get all of the money back. The entire parking lot fight was orchestrated. Tom’s “security team” trained him and Sandra, and they rehearsed again and again. Tom wore a pack of fake blood, in order to fake his own death.

Sandra gets off the plane, leaving Max and Madeline with nothing. In the movie’s final scene, she reunites with Tom and the rest of the team who pulled off the con. She tells the con men that she is officially out of the game. Tom forgives Sandra for stealing from him—after all, she did get it back. Sandra suggests getting dinner at that little Japanese restaurant on Mott Street, and Tom agrees. And with that, the movie ends, suggesting that Tom and Sandra are now going to date for real.

Phew! That’s a lot of cons. If I were Tom or Sandra, I would never lone anyone so much as a dollar again.