Russell Tovey and Bertie Carvel star in the latest thriller from Luther writer Neil Cross, complete with dark forests, ghostly apparitions, and mountains of dread
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.
