Professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) gains a new lease on life after murdering an unjust judge with cyanide, and his lover Jill Pollard (Emma Stone) eventually finds out. Though she initially opts not to report him to the police, when another man is accused of the murder, she tells him to turn himself in or she'll do it herself. At the end of the movie, Abe visits Jill's apartment complex and tampers with the elevator in the hope of killing her. After talking to her for a moment, he grabs her and attempts to throw her down an empty elevator shaft, but fate intervenes when a flashlight falls out of Jill's purse and Abe slips on it, falling down the shaft himself to his brutal demise. It's a hilariously dark capper to one of Woody Allen's more interesting films of recent years, the mere act of Jill happening to carry a flashlight saving her from sure death.