Sirens Will Reel You In
Sirens is full of surprises, and not in the way you might expect it to be. Somehow this Netflix limited series about culty, self-help–y, extremely white women doing culty, self-help–y, extremely-white-woman things is a blast, and it’s not because of Sirens’s wacky supernatural underpinnings, its random obsession with birds of prey, or its rote classist critique. All those storytelling tendrils don’t amount to much, except for almost pulling Sirens into a riptide of its own making. No, the show’s appeal lies in its complicated depiction of bickering and bruising sisters, with prickly performances from Meghann Fahy and Milly Alcock giving the series an alluring and distinguishing jolt.
With more self-awareness than a typical motherthriller and set in the same obscenely wealthy New England environs as The Perfect Couple, Netflix’s other recent (also quite funny!) go-round in this genre, Sirens feints at being about heady things: how money changes a relationship, how co-dependency can stifle a life, and (in a slightly mental-health-shaming way) how your family of origin can be a burden. Julianne Moore is wonderfully brittle as billionaire wife Michaela Kell, swanning around in creamy eggshell caftans and obsessing over whether her husband, Peter (Kevin Bacon), actually brought home her favorite chocolates from Tokyo or — gasp! — subbed in sweets from New York City instead. Glenn Howerton shows off the malleability of Dennis Reynolds, sliding all his longtime It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia character’s oddities and hangups into a playboy who is shocked to learn someone he knows grew up in — more gasping! — foster care. Sirens’s presentation of the alien one percent and their sycophants, including a Fates-like trio of women who speak in unison and dress exclusively in complementary color schemes, adds a welcome edge that keeps Sirens from sliding into unintentional wealth porn. But it’s ultimately most riveting as a domestic soap opera, a story of how two sisters who grew up in the same working-class home drastically diverged in their attempt to escape the past. And every time Sirens points Devon (Fahy) and Simone (Alcock) at each other, the women tear up the screen as they tear each other apart.
Series creator Molly Smith Metzler (who played in similar territory with the 2021 Netflix limited series Maid) adapts her 2011 play Elemeno Pea into Sirens, all five episodes of which premiere today. First to be introduced is 30-something Devon, who is understandably a mess: She’s struggling under the weight of caring for her father, Bruce (Bill Camp, turning in a performance that will terrify all of us with aging parents), whose dementia is getting worse by the day, and she’s stuck in an off-again, on-again relationship with her married boss, Ray (Josh Segarra), who has strung Devon along since high school. Devon is years into a self-destructive loop of drinking too much and sleeping with practically every guy who crosses her path, and when she gets home from a night in the drunk tank to find a gigantic Edible Arrangement on her doorstep, her last bit of pride crumbles. Unintentionally included with the delivery is an address for her long-estranged younger sister, Simone, who for months has ignored Devon’s increasingly desperate texts about Bruce’s diminished memory. Tugging the gigantic fruit display along with her — the first tell that Sirens knows how to stage a joke — a furious Devon makes the 17-hour trek via public transportation from their hometown of Buffalo to the Cliff House mansion where Simone lives with her boss, Michaela. If only Devon can talk face to face with her “self-centered gutter-rat whore” sister (Fahy has a real flair for sniping out vulgar dialogue), maybe she can help Simone understand how bad things are, and how much Devon needs a break.
But Devon’s arrival at Cliff House is as disorienting for her as when Alice tumbled into Wonderland, and Sirens gets the most leverage out of its somewhat half-baked “Does Michaela have uncanny powers?” concept as Devon wanders around a palatial estate where assistant Simone hangs on “Kiki’s” every word and executes her every desire. Moore has always been capable of an unsettling weirdness, and she really dials it up here as Michaela coos affirming statements to birds in her aviary or gazes into the middle distance off the property’s steep bluff and talks hornily about “Moby-Dick times, all those sailors crashing their boats on the rocks … all the blood.” As Devon becomes convinced that Simone is in danger under her boss’s thrall, she tries to persuade Simone to come home, a mission that pisses off Michaela, intrigues Peter, and shocks her would-be-saved sister. Their arguments form Sirens’s narrative waves, careening through discussions of what we owe our birth families, what we owe the people who take a chance on us, and what we owe ourselves.
Sirens is talky, but the way it stages these conversations to casually throw out massive reveals about Devon, Simone, and Michaela’s lives as the women snip at each other is ingenious. Of the three main character arcs, Michaela’s is the most foreseeable; a rich woman who feels trapped by her money and dismissed by her husband, yadda yadda yadda. Sirens pulls on unexpected threads, though, between Devon and Simone, and it uses their squabbles as additional set dressing, aberrations in the pleasantly bland dollhouse Kiki has created for the assistant she treats sometimes like a daughter, sometimes like a lover, and always with blurry boundaries. A sister fight in Simone’s professionally designed bedroom and gigantic walk-in closet, amid all her color-coded shoes and garish floral sheath dresses, feels like emotional warfare in a Lilly Pulitzer boutique. Simone’s pained expressions while Devon whisper-complains during one of Michaela’s fundraising speeches are perfectly capped by Fahy’s yelping “You’re the help” and Alcock’s pitifully insistent “These people are my friends.” And a knockdown, drag-out confrontation between the two in the penultimate episode actually benefits from the overused here’s one center-aligned person speaking, here’s another center-aligned person speaking, let’s go back and forth between them composition and editing so typical of streaming series. By giving each sister the opportunity to retch up years of resentments and jealousies and take up the frame while doing it, Sirens emphasizes how definitive their baggage is, and how festering their wounds, beneath those conventionally beautiful faces.
Alcock and Fahy are the main draws here, especially the latter, who is now on her third beach-set show and gets to be more messy, raw, and outright funny on Sirens than on either The White Lotus or The Perfect Couple. (If we still lived in a rom-com-friendly age, she’d shine in a version of Miss Congeniality.) Their bristling dynamic is complemented by a solid supporting cast of mostly comedic actors who nail both the hilariously dumb aspects of living under Michaela’s reign (scarfing down doughnuts behind a shed because she doesn’t allow carbs on the property) and the genuinely upsetting ones (everyone’s somber mood when Michaela orders a freeze-out of someone in her inner circle). Of that crew, Felix Solis is a constant scene-stealer as Jose, Peter’s loyal employee and one of the very few people capable of getting the upper hand on Michaela. Positioned initially as a comedic-relief class warrior disapproving of Simone’s arrogance — he has an anti-Simone group text going with the other household staff — he grows into a paternal figure for Devon, gently urging her to get her shit together after she makes an ill-advised pass at him. In a series full of troublesome and troubled men, he’s maybe the only one who still thinks about his conscience.
Sirens’s bite dulls when the series eventually pivots back to suspense, and its ending is a fine, if fairly predictable, commentary on how privilege’s greatest power is its ability to protect the status quo. What allows that conclusion to satisfy, though, is how it simultaneously highlights the emotional strata Alcock and Fahy have carved into their sororal bond and challenges everything Simone and Devon have said to each other, the admissions they’ve choked out and the promises they’ve made. Apart or together, they’re Sirens’s muses.
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