My theory (Spoilers)

My theory is since when is soap operish material considered art?

Why oh WHY does every movie with some sort of complexity spin IMDb messageboard posters into theories that one of the characters isn't "really dead" or was "dead all along"? It seems like a parlour game where everybody has to come up with a novel approach.

Director Asghar Farhadi has apparently said that Elly is dead. End of story. More importantly, it's NOT what the movie's about anyway. In fact, in many ways, Elly is the least important of the adult characters.

Your theory would only make sense if John La Carre wrote the story.

My theory is that her fiance drowned her because she was planning on leaving him. He had anger management problems and a violent streak as demonstrated when he punched the one male character he thought was moving in on his fiance in the nose. Actually, when he said he wanted to speak to Sepideh alone, I thought he was just trying to justify his evil actions by blaming his fiance for agreeing to go on the holiday trip w/o telling him. It was a tense scence that I almost thought he was going to jump out of his chair and attack Sepideh, but he didn't.

I wasn't sure it was her either. The whole scene was a bit strange.