a crime in the name of women on Apple TV+.

Irish comedian and director Sharon Horgan has a sense of family. In Canal+’s bittersweet comedy This Way Up, she camped the older sister of the fragile Aisling Bea. It is still as the head of the family that she appears in Bad Sisters, a zany tale of four sisters who dream of murdering their toxic brother-in-law and end up doing it. A familiar synopsis since Apple TV+’s Irish tragicomedy is the adaptation of the Flemish soap opera Clan (discovered on arte.tv).

A good dose of the absurd

Having lost their parents in a car accident two decades ago, Eva, Grace, Ursula, Bibi and Becka Garvey were inseparable until John Paul, husband of Grace nicknamed “the asshole”, came to stop the mechanical, with threats and denigrating remarks. The narcissistic pervert, who takes turns tormenting the Garveys, has the cat’s nine lives. He resists murder attempts until the day his lifeless body is found by his oppressed wife.

If Bad Sisters opens with the death of the torturer, the series, like a Cluedo, leaves us in uncertainty as to the modus operandi and the author of the crime. The ten episodes scroll through flashbacks of the Garvey sisters’ increasingly silly and wacky plans (poisoning, electrocution, etc.) to get rid of the tyrant and then thwart the suspicions of overly curious insurers.

Jokes and joy of living

Taking place in the leaden suburbs of Dublin, Howth and Malahide under a dragging sky, the fiction transpires the joy of life, the facetiousness and the rapid elocution of the Irish. All with a good dose of the absurd, where the original wanted to be more whodunnit. “I had never played a heroine who was part of a sibling. I don’t have any sisters either. This camaraderie and mutual support, reinforced by weeks of rehearsal, was a discovery. With these five portraits of women, Bad Sisters shows the variety of the female experience and its increased complexity in the 21st century”, emphasizes Anne-Marie Duff (Shameless, Sex Education), charmed by the “amorality” of these heroines confronted “ to the limits of their ethics and their lowest instincts”.

Control mechanisms

In the skin of the erased Grace, the actress plays a more “opaque” score than the extroverted Horgan, perfect as Eva, an alcoholic spinster, surrogate mother. “It was necessary to make extinct Grace cohabit with that which revives in contact with its own. The most precious thing was to work on her relationship before John Paul, to go back to the roots of their attachment to understand what had been the romantic spark. How did their codependency develop?” confides the actress who drew on her visits to an association of women victims of domestic violence to restore the mechanisms of control. As smooth and dark as in Dracula, Claes Bang is the perfect John Paul. Considerate and self-centered. “The women like Grace who remain are not weak, they are conditioned. Beyond funny situations, Bad Sisters can also allow some to become aware of the ill-treatment they are subjected to and to reactDuff pleads. And to conclude:It is also a call to take care of your loved ones.”

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