The Sister review – a nail-biting whodunnit that is truly haunting

It’s cold(ish). It’s dark. It’s the week leading up to Halloween. You’re probably in the mood for a quick and dirty hit of something dramatically moreish, put in the safe hands of some top-tier actors, tinged with the supernatural and stripped in four parts over the week to watch with the curtains pulled tight, are you not? Well, the Lord – or ITV – has provided. The Sister, which started on Monday and continues nightly until Thursday, is a supernaturally-tinged dose of nail-bitery, doled out in suspenseful chunks and starring Russell Tovey and Bertie Carvel.

The tale properly began one rainy, windswept night with a man (a round-shouldered, stringy-haired Carvel, all Dickensian malevolence and creep) turning up on the well-appointed doorstep of happily married thirtysomething Nathan (Tovey) to plunge him into terror with the words: “They’re digging up the woods.” For Nathan has a secret and it’s quite a good ’un. Which is to say – a bad ’un. We come to realise – via the medium of flashbacks to limp bodies being dragged out of cars, dark nights and darker forest paths – that Nathan was intimately involved with the disappearance of his wife Holly’s sister, Elise, about seven years ago.

Carvel’s stringy-haired prophet of doom is Prof Bob Morrow, an “expert” in the uncanny and, as a possibly more lucrative sideline, a drug dealer who got involved with Nathan and the soon-to-be-missing-very-much-presumed-dead Elise Fox (Simone Ashley) on said dark night all those years ago.

By the time we arrive at the midpoint of the miniseries, things are chugging along as pleasingly and efficiently as you would expect from the Luther creator Neil Cross, who has adapted his book, the psychological thriller Burial, for the series. If you were to engage your brain to what I would consider for an ITV weeknight seasonal offering to be an unfair degree, you would probably be able at any point to guess most of what is about to unfold in the next 20 minutes. You might possibly be able to unravel the thing entire if you remain – even at this late stage of 2020 – astute. But if you keep yourself under control, there is a large enough number of enjoyable twists, clues (to NOTICE, not SOLVE and ruin everything) and red herrings to satisfy your post-dinner entertainment cravings, while still allowing you enough distance from proceedings to wonder where you could buy the lovely wine glasses from which Holly (Amrita Acharia) sips while contemplating her sister’s absence, Bob’s presence, and her perfect but nightmare-prone husband.

And the plot is, perhaps, not the main point. The series’ real focus and achievement lies in the dread it manages to layer on at every turn. Between the growing suspicions of Holly’s policewoman friend Jacki (Nina Toussaint-White), the awful power of Morrow, and the grief of the Fox family, the sense of suffocation grows and you soon find yourself running a finger round your collar to loosen it. If things keep up like this, we’ll all be gasping for oxygen by denouement time.

A large part of this success must be laid at Tovey’s feet. His Everyman, suffering as an essentially good person trapped in a worsening hell not of his own making, is absolutely agonising. Seeing his sweet, childlike features – which we last encountered sparkling with optimistic energy in Years and Years – suffused with guilt, which has been gnawing at his vitals even before Morrow returned, is genuinely moving. In Morrow, who sends him “evidence” that Elise’s ghost walks, and talks, of “mental imprint manifestations”, we have traditional spookiness, but it is the ongoing scarification of Nathan’s conscience that truly terrifies. If it were set in a more prestigious production overall, I’d say Tovey could be up for an award. We’ll see.

It poses the perennially fascinating question of what we are capable of when under pressure. What does a good man do when he stands to lose everything? What does a good woman do when buried secrets erupt and shatter everything? Is redemption possible, and at what price? And where CAN I get those wine glasses?

I’ve looked ahead – I couldn’t help myself, which is far from always or even often the case – and for those who balk at supernatural shenanigans I say, hang in there. It’s an element well-handled, even if I wish the connection between ghosts et al and our internal but very real horrors had been more fully explored rather than merely hinted at. Huddle up, and draw the curtains tight.