'Adoration' Recap (Episodes 1-6) Explained: What Happens To Enrico?

Adoration is an Italian Netflix coming-of-age show intertwined with a murder mystery. The six-part series explores an Italian small town through the eyes of young teens and their families. Elena and Vanessa are two best friends who are the complete opposite of each other. Vanessa’s the most beautiful, popular girl who gets good grades and is adored by her parents. Elena, on the other hand, is the “rebel” kid. Her grades are always tanking, and she’s generally hanging out with the wrong crowd, and she can’t help but see the good in people. It is the end of the school year, and summer’s just begun. Elena learns that she failed the exam and now plans to leave the city. She asks Vanessa to join her, but the latter thinks she’s just playing as usual and doesn’t pay much heed to it. However, when Elena doesn’t show up to Vanessa’s highly anticipated birthday party even though she promised she would, Vanessa starts to get worried. Let’s find out what happened to Elena and if Vanessa learns the truth of her best friend’s disappearance.

Spoiler Alert

Is Elena Dead? 

Elena’s upset; she didn’t do well in the exam, but her boyfriend Enrico shows up at her house anyway. He asks her to come with him to the Cassino, but she lies that she’s going to stay back and study. At the same time, when Vanessa asks her to meet, she says she’s going out with Enrico. The truth is she’s going to meet another boy named Giorgio. This guy happens to be Vanessa’s cousin. Elena’s phone has a tracking app that Enrico and she use to track each other (yikes), but she leaves it at home so no one can suspect her. When Vanessa realizes Elena’s not showing up to her party, she decides to forget about her and have a good time, but she’s soon going to regret this. When Elena doesn’t show up even the next day, Vanessa starts to worry and puts up missing posters everywhere along with Enrico. 2 days after her disappearance, her body’s found behind the school. 

What Does Giorgio Do To Melissa?

Elena’s death causes a stir in the town. A little before she was found, there were some strange messages on her social media accounts. These were sent by Melissa, another classmate of theirs who thought Elena had finally run away. It seems Melissa may have done it out of spite, but she too wanted to escape the town like Elena. Melissa and Giorgio are a couple, but recently Giorgio hasn’t been very interested in Melissa. Before Elena’s body was found, Melissa tried to get Giorgio interested in her again. They went to his place, but things got too intense, and he hurt her despite her telling him to stop. Melissa’s aunt is Chiara, a detective in town, but Melissa isn’t close to her and just wants to go back to Rome, so at first she doesn’t tell her about what’s happened, but she does tell Vanessa after a lot of thinking, and even apologizes about the messages she sent to her. 

Is Giorgio responsible? 

While there’s the murder investigation, there’s also a lot of other teen drama in town. Vera is Giorgio’s sister, and she’s been wanting to leave town to go see her estranged dad, who is now with another woman. Her mom hates her dad, but she thinks it’s her mom’s fault that he left. In truth, he’s just an absent father who never really cared. Vera is extra rebellious because she thinks she’ll be able to grab attention if she acts a certain way, and then she’ll get to go see her dad. But eventually, she learns that this is not the case, and he’s just been lying to her about sending tickets. On the other hand, Giorgio feels guilty that he might’ve been the last person who saw Elena before she died. He tells his mom about what happened and then half of it to Vera too. He tells them that he was in love with Elena. 

On the other hand, one of the other girls, Diana, is texting a man on the internet and sending him nudes. She’s insecure about her body because she has a massive red birthmark on the side of her hip. She gets validation from this man, so she feels happy about it. When he drives 2 hours to come see her, he asks if he can paint another portrait of her but live. Man, this guy with his AI-generated art. Diana nearly falls for it, but she realizes he’s shady and decides to get back to her parents’ restaurant, where she’s replaced Elena as a waitress (phew). But this isn’t the end of it; now she’s starting to like one of the older men that her parents know, Claudio, and they end up getting together. Later, he even offers to take her to Rome when his family stays back, and she agrees to go. Fortunately, Diana has wonderful protective parents, and before something can go terribly wrong, her mother sends Claudio packing out of their lives for good. Diana may still end up in sketchy situations because that’s just how she is, but she’ll probably grow up eventually, as everyone expects her to. In the meantime, Enrico, his dad, and Christin, one of the other boys in the group, beat up the homeless man that Elena used to feed often. Everybody knew she was a kindhearted person, and obviously, this man didn’t do anything to her, which is proven after he’s questioned and released. 

How Does Giorgio Get Caught? 

Vera also knows that Vanessa and her boyfriend know that Giorgio was the last to see Elena. Vanessa ends up telling Chiara because she feels terrible about what he did to Melissa. This sparks the idea that he could’ve actually done something bad to Elena. But Giorgio is not guilty of murder, because he left her alone after they fought over the fact that she wanted to escape with him and he said no. Melissa then tells Chiara what happened to her. Another thing is that Elena’s body had amphetamines in it when she died, and Giorgio was caught with them in the locker room, which is why he’s not on the rowing team anymore. All of these things make him look pretty guilty. In the meantime though, Vanessa completely changes her personality. She starts to dress like Vanessa to feel closer to her, pierces her nose, and cuts her hair; she even starts to work at Diana’s mom’s restaurant. I suppose it’s her way of grieving, but of course her mom and Gianmarco, her boyfriend, hate it. On the other hand, Giorgio’s dad shows up because Vanessa’s mom requests him to, but he ends up making a mess of things, telling the boy to plead guilty and change his lawyer, and then disappears himself because he has to look after his pregnant wife. Finally, Vera knows which of them was in the right. 

Who is Arianna? 

Amidst all the chaos, Gianmarco’s sister’s pregnant, and Vanessa has to pretend to be happy all the time while she’s with his family. It’s almost as if they’re already married, but Vanessa feels suffocated and decides to leave the boy and hang out with a girl she met at the restaurant, Arianna. Arianna and Vanessa immediately hit it off, and she asks to go to a party with her. Elena and Arianna knew each other. Vanessa notices the girls taking some pills, and this will be something that will help her a bit later on. Arianna also helps Vanessa have a sexual awakening. It seems she might’ve always liked Elena more than just a friend. Vanessa and Ariana get together, and she actually feels alive again, but there’s still the question of who killed Elena if it wasn’t Giorgio. 

Who Killed Elena? 

Vanessa realizes she made a mistake getting Giorgio arrested, so she decides to do some snooping about the drugs. Arianna does some sleuthing for her and finds out that one of her friends gave Elena the drugs, so that makes Giorgio not guilty of that. Additionally, Arianna finds a video on her friend’s phone of Elena and Enrico one night, and it looks like he’s being violent with her and forcing her to do something she doesn’t want to. This gets Vanessa’s cogs turning, and she realizes that there were many times Elena had bruises on her body, and she never questioned how Elena got them. Vanessa goes up to Enrico and tells him she knows he’s a murderer, and he nearly beats her up then and there, but Gianmarco breaks up the fight. He also realizes that Vanessa was in love with Elena and tells her that she disgusts him, throwing her out of the house. 

At the end of Adoration, it is Enrico’s mom who sends her own son to prison. She finds a speeding ticket in the mail for the night of Elena’s murder and realizes her son’s been lying about everything. He had found out about Elena and Giorgio, and when Giorgio left the poor girl, he’d choked her to death because she was nothing but a girl who slept around. Fortunately, unlike his father, Enrico’s mother immediately feels like a failed parent and throws him under the bus because she’s so ashamed. In the end, all the kids come out to shame Enrico, who gets arrested for Elena’s murder. But it’s not just Enrico who is responsible for Elena’s death. It’s also Vanessa’s mom who hated the girl’s guts and always insulted her for being a bad influence, even though she was a kind-hearted person. It’s Enrico’s dad who didn’t care that his son had taken the life of somebody. It’s everybody in the town who thought she was just a rebellious girl who didn’t care about anything.

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