Ahead of New ‘Luther’ Movie, a Deep Dive Into Luther & Alice’s Complicated Relationship

Idris Elba, Ruth Wilson, and Dermot Crowley are returning for a new Luther movie coming to Netflix, and it, of course, begs the simple question regarding one of their characters: How?! Last we saw Wilson’s Alice, well, the psychopath was seemingly dead after one final confrontation between her and Elba’s detective, Luther, at the end of the series’ five-season run in 2019.

“I think she’s had a lot of reconstruction surgery,” Wilson joked when TV Insider spoke with her while promoting her Apple TV series Down Cemetery Road with Emma Thompson. “She haunts me. She doesn’t die. She keeps coming back.”

She continued, “I love Alice. She’s very fun to play. And the way that Neil [Cross] writes her is always — you read it, and you’re like, OK, this is so brilliant. She has great comic lines, and she’s just so irreverent and terrifying and funny in equal measure. I love her because she doesn’t have any morals — she doesn’t have to live by everyone else’s morals — and that is freedom for her. She can just play by her own rules, and it is exciting to her, and she sort of loves being on the run with Luther. So, I’m looking forward to getting back with the team and working with all of them and playing Alice again.”

Elba and Crowley returned in the 2023 film, Luther: The Fallen Sun; Wilson did not. Now, in this new film, Netflix teases, “Luther has been secretly called back into service amidst a new wave of brutal, seemingly random murders. But how can he save London when everyone on all sides seems to want him dead?”

Ahead of her return, we’re breaking down Luther and Alice’s very complicated relationship.

Des Willie/BBCAmerica

How do Luther and Alice meet?

Where else would a detective and a psychopath meet but during the course of a murder investigation? In this case, it’s after Alice kills her parents (and the dog) and calls it in, seemingly distraught. But during the course of their sit-down, he notices she doesn’t yawn after he does; doing so is a sign of empathy, which she doesn’t have. He also knows that she didn’t stage the scene to look like something else because as a malignant narcissist, she doesn’t want anyone else to get the credit.

That first in-depth conversation sets the stage for all to come: Each is like a game between the two, one that is so entertaining to watch as they easily meet each other at every moment in their back-and-forths. These are two of the most brilliant people in a room — she’s a genius — when it comes to this subject, and they both know it. Is it any wonder that Alice then focuses on Luther, making him her next project?

Does Luther arrest Alice?

While he knows where the proof is that she killed her parents (gun fragments in the dog, whose ashes are in an urn), he doesn’t arrest her. Rather, he warns her that if she doesn’t stay away from his ex-wife Zoe (Indira Varma), he’ll arrest someone else for her parents’ murder, giving that person the credit. Then, when she visits Zoe again, Luther warns her he’ll kill her.

In Alice’s eyes, she is helping him by killing Henry Madsen (Anton Saunders), a serial killer Luther let fall (resulting in him being in a coma) and threatens to implicate him if he arrests her. “I did it for you!” she tells him. She later tells him that what she did for him proved something she hadn’t previously believed: There is love in the world.

After Ian (Steven Mackintosh) kills Zoe and frames Luther, the detective goes to Alice, as a safe space to think and for her help. She ultimate kills Ian, with Luther protesting but Zoe’s boyfriend Mark (Paul McGann) telling her to pull the trigger. She’s arrested for that murder, but Luther then helps her escape in Season 2.

Do Luther and Alice get together?

Yes, but it’s quite the journey to get there, and it’s not like everything’s sunshine and rainbows once they do. She calls them friends in Season 1 Episode 2 (he denies it). Then, in the following episode, he tries to put an end to their “weird” dynamic, admitting that it started off because he was scared of her, then he thought if he was her friend, he could control her, but he can’t.

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After Alice escapes following Ian’s murder, she invites Luther to join her on the run, telling him, “I know you want to, you’ve got that tell-tale heart.” He can’t, he tells her, “Because I am who I am and you are who you are.” She leaves him with a kiss to his cheek. She returns in Season 3 because she wants “him,” she says. When Luther is forced to choose between her and his new love interest, Mary (Sienna Guillory), by vigilante killer Marwood (Elliot Cowan), he says to shoot Alice, but the women work together to stop him. Mary then helps Alice escape since she saved her life and tells Luther to go. He does, and Season 3 ends with Luther and Alice walking off together.

At the beginning of Season 4, Luther is told that Alice is dead (she isn’t). As flashbacks in Season 5 to two years prior reveal, they were very much together in the cabin where he’d been living. But he couldn’t let the job go. And, as he’d been told, while Alice was his blindspot, Luther didn’t love her; she frightened him and excited him and he mistook it for love.

Does Luther kill Alice?

Alice killing DS Halliday (Wunmi Mosaku) leads to the final — at the time — showdown between her and Luther in the Season 5 finale. Taunting him that he won’t arrest her this time and about how he’ll cover it up, she shoots at him, hitting him in his arm. He chases her into a building under construction. She claims that Zoe was right, that he doesn’t care about anyone unless they can feed his compulsions, that friends and enemies are all the same to him. In fact, she accuses him of loving Zoe more when she was dead because it gave him an excuse to behave how he wanted.

When he says he’s going to arrest her for Halliday’s murder, however, she tells him he doesn’t understand love — he can only mimic and recognize it. He asks if this is love, and she says it is, then reveals she still has one bullet in her gun. After he rushes at her, she hangs off a platform, but rather than letting him help pull her up, she slices his hand and falls to her death… or so it seems.

How do you think Luther is going to bring back Ruth Wilson’s Alice? Let us know in the comments section below.