Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Sister’ On Hulu, A Thriller About Two Men Whose Shared Past Is About To Get Dug Up Again

When you see certain producers and writers attached to shows, you give the shows the benefit of the doubt. That’s the case for Neil Cross, the novelist and screenwriter who is responsible for Luther, Hard Sun and Crossbones. The Sister is his adaptation of his own novel Burial, so viewers can be pretty confident that the vision he created in the novel will be preserved for TV.

THE SISTER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Looking up through a clear coffee table, we see a man pouring out the contents of a pill bottle, then pour himself a drink. Just as he’s about to swallow the entire fistful of pills, he’s mesmerized by the woman he sees on the screen. The year is 2013.

The Gist: The woman is Holly Fox (Amrita Acharia), in a press conference about her sister Elise (Simone Ashley), who disappeared on New Years’ Eve in 2009. The man about to off himself, Nathan Redman (Russell Tovey), drops the pills back on the table.

We flash forward seven years. Nathan has upgraded from his tiny apartment to a well-appointed house. He hears a knock on the door, and outside, standing in the rain, is a person that he hasn’t seen in over a decade: Bob Morrow (Bertie Carvel). “They’re digging up the woods,” Bob tells him. When he makes his way in, he tells Nathan that the woods where they buried Elise — yes, that’s right — are being dug up for a new housing development. They have to go in ahead of the workers and remove her.

That’s when Bob looks over at the pictures on the wall and figures out that when Nathan said, “My wife is going to be home soon,” that the wife is none other than Holly Fox. We go back to 2013, and see Nathan stake Holly out at her real estate office; he calls her under the guise that he’s looking to move. As she shows him houses, they get on well.

When she meets him for a date, she explains to him that this is the first time she’s gone anywhere since her sister disappeared. While talking about the night Elise disappeared, we see Elise at a New Years party in 2009, the same party where Nathan and Bob happened to run into each other. Later, we see Nathan flashing back to him and Bob dragging Elise out of a car and into the woods.

Back in the present, Bob sends Nathan a CD that he says should be played loud; on it, there’s mostly static, but then Nathan hears a familiar voice say his name and “I’m not dead!”. Nathan goes back to Bob, who records these otherworldly voices as part of his studies in the paranormal (which we learn about when the two of them meet in 2009, when Bob was a guest on a radio show Nathan was working on).

When Bob visits Nathan at work after Nathan denies he hears anything, he tells Nathan that what happened that night has been eating away at Bob for this entire decade, and he knows that it will come back to them if anyone finds even a piece of Elise’s remains. Bob claims that Elise is haunting him, and that “we have to set this right.” When Nathan refuses, Bob threatens to tell Holly about that night.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Neil Cross adapted his own novel Burial for this 4-part series, and it has the vibe of his best-known show, Luther. There’s that same darkness, the same feeling of exhaustion and heaviness that pervaded Luther, even if this is less about a cop and more about… a killer? Two people with a secret?

Our Take: Because Neil Cross is producing The Sister based on his own novel, his track record leads you to believe that the four-part limited series will be a taut psychological thriller with moments of humor and not a lot of padding. That’s more or less what you get with The Sister.

But, while watching the first episode, we just had a nagging feeling that, through the constant flashbacks, Cross is unnecessarily teasing the viewers about what actually happened to Elise the night she disappeared. What we know is that Bob and Nathan disposed of Elise’s body in the woods on New Years’ Eve 2009. Beyond that, we don’t know. Did she die accidentally? Was she murdered? Did they murder her?

All of that can be resolved with a more complete flashback. But Cross is content with doling out these flashes piecemeal, perhaps throwing some red herrings in the viewers’ way until we find out what really happened.

That’s all well and good if what happens in the present can satiate viewers between getting pieces of the puzzle. We’re not sure that’s what we’re getting with The Sister, at least in the first episode. Nathan wants to make like what happened that night isn’t affecting him, but it most assuredly is, considering he constantly flashes back to his younger self running through the woods. Also, what’s up with him stalking and then dating Holly? Did he do that because of guilt, or did he do it because he truly fell for her? He knows who she is and he knows what he did. How did he manage to keep this a secret from her for so long?

This lack of early tension isn’t due to the performances of Tovey, with his buttoned-up rage on display, or Carvel, who goes from creepy to funny to back to creepy in a heartbeat, especially when he visits Nathan at his office. It’s just that all we want to know is just what in the frick happened that night, and Cross just isn’t giving us enough in between those pieces of information to keep us from getting frustrated.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Nathan comes home, thinking Holly is there, but he’s all alone. He hears a noise outside and thinks that it might be Elise haunting him, as well. He then thinks back to that night, and Bob dragging a body out of a car, saying to him, “What did you do? What did you do?”

Sleeper Star: Amrita Acharia is doing some yeoman’s work as Holly, a character who has no idea that she’s been living a lie for seven years, who is dealing with the fact that she can’t get pregnant, and is about to get hit upside the head with the a truth so heinous it’ll probably be devestating.

Most Pilot-y Line: “No one has to know; just you and me… and her,” says Bob to Nathan, “her” being Elise. It’s a weirdly-placed bit of black humor in what is otherwise one of the episode’s tensest scenes.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re giving The Sister a recommendation because we trust Neil Cross knows how to tease out the truth of the story without annoying viewers. But the first episode just doesn’t give us a whole lot of confidence that we won’t get more annoyed the more the truth is teased out.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream The Sister On Hulu