Sirens Review
Director: Nicole Kassell, Quyen Tran and Lila Neugebauer
Date Created: 2025-05-22 15:45
2.5
Sirens Review: Directed by Nicole Kassell, Quyen Tran and Lila Neugebauer, this series is inspired by the stage play Elemeno Pea, written by Molly Smith Metzler, who is also the writer and showrunner. Starring Meghann Fahy, Milly Alcock, Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon, and others. With such a cast together in one series, the level of expectation was definitely high.
The series consists of five episodes, each about an hour long, and is an effort to plumb the depths of power, money, and twisted family relationships in a darkly comedic tone. Having slogged my way through all five episodes, I was not in the least bit perplexed, not only at what the hell I had watched but also how the hell I was supposed to engage with what I had just watched.
The series revolves around two sisters: Devon, played by Meghann Fahy, a pragmatic young woman not dazzled by the glitter of money, and Simone, played by Milly Alcock, who seems to be slipping under the influence of her wealthy employer, Michaela Kell, played by Julianne Moore. Worried her sister is about to be caught inside a cult-like situation, Devon decides to act. But it’s not that simple. Michaela, meanwhile, is a force to be reckoned with – formidable, complex, controlling- and the struggle of wills between these three women immediately forms the central thrust of the series.
Sirens Review
First things first, Netflix’s Sirens is visually stunning. The cinematography is full of the cold,  glittering beauty of money and the houses, clothes and whispered beach-town ambience add texture to the weird place where the characters exist. The show can occasionally shine, especially in the verbal sparring between the headlining women. It’s crackling dialogue, and although the tension in some scenes cranks effectively, in others it cranks abominably. This is like a game of chess, and the players are trying to outmanoeuvre each other in terms of emotional and psychological control.
The Sirens series has so much in its favour on the surface, but there was something about it and the characters that I just didn’t warm to. They were more like symbols, not people. The show wants to get into themes of status, identity, family trauma and control, and to be a dark, psychologically complex tale. I didn’t hate the show, but I didn’t like it, either. I just kind of watched it, curious enough to see how things end, but never fully drawn in.
The performances are strong, and that’s not a surprise when the cast is so incredible. Julianne Moore fills Michaela with the kind of creepy sexiness you don’t think you believe in, but just take a look at her. Meghann Fahy gives Devon a frustration and protectiveness that are easy to relate to, and Milly Alcock a vulnerability as Simone, a girl caught between love and loyalty and desire. Kevin Bacon is also there, later in the series, and I only wish he had more depth earlier on, he does bring a new layer of mystery when he finally arrives.
More than that, there was something so hollow about some of the characters despite amazing performances. It’s like the show has given them good lines to say, but hasn’t let us feel how brutal it was for them. Emotional sequences were more intellectual, and not emotionally charged, and that’s fine for some series, but this one was alienating to me, putting a barrier between me and the characters and story.
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Thematically, the pacing was one of the more problematic things in Sirens on Netflix. Some episodes dragged, some threw a plot twist at us from out of the sky. It’s trying to have it both ways, skittering into off-colour humour but crossing into heavy-handed family drama that doesn’t always pay its emotional dividend. I love dark humour, too, but in this case, the jokes consistently didn’t land for me and at times, I didn’t know what kind of show it was trying to be: a psych drama, a satire, horror, or a slow-burning mystery.
There is also a subplot involving the sisters’ dad and a whole heap of emotion stuff that was actually intriguing, however, not explored as much as I would have liked. These are the backstories of emotional baggage where the series truly could’ve grabbed me, but instead, they feel more like side notes.
Netflix series Sirens Review: Summing Up
Netflix show Sirens is ambitious. It’s glossy, attractive, well-acted, and full of the snap in the writing. If you’re into shows about class warfare, power structures and fraught character relationships, there might be something for you to like. But there was an emotional distance, a disjunction in the storytelling that made it a hard series to love.
For me, this series is just too stylised and not sufficiently based in emotions for it to be a series I can fully appreciate. There have been little flairs of genius, but they’ve all been bookended with long-running stretches that just failed to truly grab me.
Sirens 2025 is now streaming on Netflix.
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