Soon, Hank is pouring the cash on his kitchen table, to the delight of his wife. But complications arise. Sarah tells Hank that he has to return some of the money to the airplane. That way, she says, when the police find the plane, they won't suspect that any money has been stolen. Hank shakes his head.
Hank agrees and unwittingly sets off an irreversible chain of tragedy.
A Simple Plan conceives its characters as Elizabethan plotters. When we first meet Sarah, she is wearing a red bathrobe. From her plush home, she engineers much of the film's action with a quiet urgency, like a Shakespearean temptress who whispers eloquently to her weaker husband and who propagates her sinisterism down the chain of command. Though Sarah doesn't commit any of the film's gruesome deeds, she is its coldest creation. While breast feeding her newborn daughter, she persuades Hank to trick Lou into confessing to a murder.