The Sister Review: Nothing Stays Buried for Long (Season 1 Episodes 1-2)

The Sister is one of those grimdark stories where this is going to work for you or it’s just not. This isn’t something where you think it’s merely fine and then you layer qualifiers onto it. To be fair, it is mainly fine but it’s how game you are for this kind of feel and aesthetic that will have you on its side or not. 

The Sister comes from the mind of Neil Cross, who most notably was the force behind Luther, which will put any kind of positive or negative feelings for The Sister Season 1 Episode 1 and Episode 2 into really stark focus. If you did or did not like Luther and its tone, then your opinion of this will be fairly consistent to that. 

On a completely different wavelength, this feels not wholly dissimilar to Dead to Me, where that series was so twisty that it often had the feel of a well-done writing exercise that could add turns to the plot in as it needed them and The Sister is a bit like that. the difference here is that the twists seem entirely intentional but still like we’re watching a narrative flex. 

For the most part, these first two episodes work fairly well — particularly in setting up the drama and conflict that will be paid off on the back-half of the series — if you’re willing to accept that this is a world that has a different relationship with logic than we do. 

Throughout these two episodes, it asks you to accept things about the characters and the plot that feel a bit beyond the pale. You can either accept those things or you can’t. That’s really what it boils down to. If you can, great. If you can’t, no one will fault you for that. It demands that you swallow some rather baffling notions and back-history. 

It hits you almost right at the start that the main character, Nathan (played by Russell Tovey), married the sister of the woman that he killed many years prior and it expects you to be okay with that. It’s a bold, daring move that, even if it doesn’t entirely work, you have to respect the audacity of it. 

It’s saying right at the top that this is a guy who isn’t the best and is operating in behavior that is, at the very least, morally questionable and asking you to sympathize with him. This is straight out of the handbook for effectively writing an antihero and, if nothing else, it gets right that you have to have the right actor in that role to get us on his side. 

Russell Tovey gets us to care about his character in ways that aren’t completely on the page. He makes you feel sorry for him, when you have zero reason to have any pity for him. This is a mess that he, as far as we know at this point, entirely made for himself and yet we feel bad for him when the walls start to close in around him here. 

Another bright spot to these first two episodes is the figure known as Bob, who flits in and out of scenes to be the one to really push the plot along and he has a really fascinating presence here. He has an air of spookiness to him that goes right up to the point of being creepy and nearly crossing that line. He’s the type of character that you expect to be part of Nathan’s psyche. 

The flashback structure during these episodes can feel a bit jarring but they are really effective at demonstrating how the past decade has eroded at both Nathan and Bob. The best example of this is the hairstyling for the latter. When we see Bob in the past, his hair is neatly slicked back, it’s well maintained, it looks nearly professional with just enough quirk to seem eccentric. 

When we see him in the present, however, his hair is all over the place and he looks almost manic, like he is the scoundrel of the piece. It’s a nicely done but blunt way of showing us the extent of how far they both have fallen. 

What did you think of these episodes of The Sister? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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The Sister is streaming on Hulu.

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