At first I bought the movie’s basic reading, but now there’s no doubt in my mind it’s a fakeout: Ilsa Faust is absolutely alive.

I will fully be ready to look like an idiot if she’s not, because I’ve run down everything I’ve thought of that the movie could do to telegraph her death being a fakeout, without actually revealing it:

- establish the idea of IMF people successfully faking people’s deaths in general and Ilsa’s specifically ✅

- Have both plot and character reasons why Ilsa pretending to be dead would be necessary ✅

- Establish that the way she supposedly died wasn’t guaranteed to be fatal ✅

- Have a scene vaguely establishing that the IMF is getting ready to do a con, but not specify what ✅

- No last words or final moments for her character ✅

- Skip past what the IMF does immediately after she supposedly dies ✅

- No one in the IMF literally says “she’s dead” ✅

That last one is big: Christopher McQuarrie has gone on record saying “No one in the audience of a Mission: Impossible movie will accept something is true until Ethan Hunt says it”. He never says she’s dead, and the closest he comes is thinking of her in a montage with Marie (who we also never specifically are told is dead) and Grace (who we know is alive).

Meanwhile, when Grace says “she’s dead”, Luther says “No, you’re alive because of her, and that’s the truth”, which is very specifically calling attention to the beginning and end of that sentence.