Slow-burn thriller was a hit in Britain — for good reason
‘THE SISTER’ ★★
“The Sister,” a British hit that debuts on Hulu this week, adapts the 2008 Neil Cross novel “Burial” and makes for a clammy, sparingly vicious crime story with a “Blood Simple” hook. Will the guilt-ridden protagonist played by Russell Tovey — purveyor of the best deceptive, dry-mouthed alibi delivery in modern television — get away with it? Should he?
Cross’ adaptation has been toned down and cleaned up for its source material. “The Sister” is not a grabber. It’s a simmer, intended for a relatively grown-up thriller audience. It’s also practically denuded of bit players. When someone sits in a pub, or enters a police station, humanity has all but vanished. The limited series, coolly absorbing, makes do with five main characters, all superbly acted; four episodes, shot in pre-COVID 2019; roughly three hours of story; two tons of often comically fraught interplay; and a single, potent buried secret.
One rainy night, Nathan, played by Tovey, is visited by a hunch-shouldered acquaintance, Bob (Bertie Carvel, having a ball with this skeezeball). A paranormal expert, possibly out of his mind, Bob comes bearing news: “They’re digging up the woods.” In other words, it’s time to excavate and relocate the body of a young woman Bob and Nathan apparently killed years earlier.
Nathan’s wife, Holly (Amrita Acharia, excellent in a narrowly prescribed role), returns home and wonders who this scraggly, glaring menace is sitting on their stairs. Bob in turn wonders how, and why, Nathan has managed to marry this particular woman, who is the buried corpse’s long-grieving sister. Holly knows nothing of Nathan’s involvement in whatever happened that night in the forest.
In Cross’ novel, the story played the reveals and complications chronologically straight. “The Sister” opts instead for a fragmented series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, largely successfully. A brief prologue tips us off straight away to Nathan’s profound distress, his suicide attempt interrupted by something he sees on TV. The drug-fueled events of that night in the hollow, rumored to be haunted, are doled out in bits and pieces.
Director Niall MacCormick (“The Victim”) stages and shoots each composition with geometric care. He frames greeting-card marketer Nathan and real-estate agent Holly just so in their slightly terrifying and underfurnished flat, whose walls are dotted with commemorative portraits of the dead sister. Outside the home, MacCormick’s camera glides across the woods or onto a sweaty dance floor on the night Elise (Simone Ashley) meets her doom.
Screenwriter Cross makes the fifth main character, a detective played by Nina Toussaint-White, a copper of extreme and increasingly implausible narrative convenience. Toussaint-White’s exquisite underplaying mitigates the problem. If the TV adaptation goes a bit slack near the end, just when you want the screws to tighten, it’s worth seeing for the performances. And for this: The supernatural element is artfully realized in a selective, effective handful of sound cues and visual strokes, among them a voice from the grave, recorded on a static-ridden CD. “The Sister” may be familiar, but it’s rarely obvious.