Sinister sisterly scheming sticks tricky tonal vibe

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This article was published 03/09/2022 (1490 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A wickedly funny and unexpectedly warm crime thriller (on Apple TV+, with new episodes dropping Tuesdays), Bad Sisters centres on a close-knit group of Irish siblings, the irrepressible Garvey girls, who decide they need to do something about John Paul (Claes Bang), the odious, abusive husband of their sister Grace (Anne Marie Duff).

In the first episode, we know John Paul is dead. (“He’s Satan’s problem now,” comments a not very mournful mourner.) Dogged insurance investigator Thomas Claffin (Brian Gleeson), with the reluctant help of his half-brother Matt (Daryl McCormack), is looking into the murky facts surrounding John Paul’s demise, hoping to avoid a payout that could sink the family business. “Strange way to meet your end” is as much information as we get about the death.

Through a series of flashbacks starting months before, we also know that the sisters have gone from joking about killing John Paul, to joking-not-joking about killing him, and then to outright planning. But we don’t quite know what happened, and it will be 10 episodes before these two plots converge and we get the big reveal.

With its twinned timelines and mysterious death, its exploration of female solidarity and patriarchal control, its coastal views and really large glasses of wine, this might sound like an Irish reprise of Big Little Lies. But it’s not just the Dublin setting that’s different. Based on the Belgian series Clan and adapted by veteran Irish comedian Sharon Horgan (who also stars as Eva, the eldest Garvey girl, who brought up her sisters after their parents died), the series explores the charm of incompetence. Even when the characters in Bad Sisters are doing pretty bad things, they tend to do them in an endearingly inept way, which makes for an unusual kind of crime series.

A critic for The Irish Times describes it as “a sort of Celtic Little Women that spools forth like Maeve Binchy collaborating with Truman Capote.” Clearly, there’s a lot going on with this tricky tonal vibe, which can be downright cynical but also sweetly comic.

Things get very dark at points. There’s a detailed breakdown of John Paul’s coercive control of his wife. (“He’s ground her down so small,” one of the sisters says in despair.) There’s some truly terrible collateral damage once John Paul is marked for death. There’s an unsettling amount of taxidermy.

But running alongside these difficult elements is the fundamentally optimistic observation that ordinary people don’t take to premeditated murder easily. They don’t have a natural talent for it.

As viewers, we have become accustomed to watching supernaturally effective murderers, serial killers and paid assassins. Bad Sisters possesses an Irish distrust of slick, self-assured characters, those Tom Cruise-y types with great teeth who are good at everything. There’s something refreshing about the characters’ emotional flailing and moral confusion and understandable human error.

The Garvey sisters — levelheaded Eva, along with no-nonsense Bibi (Sarah Greene), distracted Ursula (Eva Birthistle) and wayward baby of the family Becka (Eve Hewson) — make for a hopeless criminal conspiracy, spending a lot of time in affectionate sisterly bickering, borrowing each other’s clothes (without asking) and drinking. Their proposed murder methods tend to the outré. Eva wonders why they can’t just use poison, “like normal women.” As they attempt to work out their would-be perfect murder plans, you can expect a certain amount of slapstick comedy and the occasional freak accident.

And then there’s the unlucky investigator Thomas, who’s just trying to figure out what’s going on. There’s an explicit comparison to Colombo, what with Thomas’s rumpled suits and social awkwardness and “just one more thing” persistence. But where Colombo always zeroed in on the guilty party, Thomas is hapless. When he does get close to the truth, it’s usually because he’s stumbled over it.

In fact, the only truly competent character is John Paul. Bang, who’s made a study of entitled masculinity in projects like The Square and 2020’s Dracula, is brilliant in his insidious sadism. If there’s one thing John Paul hates, it’s women looking happy, and he’s an expert at making them unhappy, with a skilfully deployed mix of threats, undermining, gaslighting, manipulation, negging, withholding and occasional bursts of charm.

John Paul a terrible man, but even with plenty of motivation, murder doesn’t come easy to the Garvey girls. Murder is hard in Bad Sisters, and when you think about it, that’s a surprisingly cheerful takeaway.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca