Sirens Review: Julianne Moore's Show Is Messy, Addictive And Never Boring

NDTV

3 days ago

New Delhi:
In Greek mythology, sirens lured sailors to their deaths with irresistible songs. In Sirens, Netflix's gleefully unhinged five-part limited series, the call isn't coming from the rocks or the sea, it's coming from the sprawling cliffside mansion of a raptor-loving billionaire socialite played by Julianne Moore, and the song sounds a lot like WAP.
If that's not enough of a hint, this is not your average prestige drama. Think The White Lotus on an espresso bender, crossed with Succession's scorn for wealth, a splash of Ryan Murphy melodrama, and just enough Shakespearean tragedy and sibling trauma to keep it grounded (sort of).
The story follows Devon (Meghann Fahy), a messy, acerbic woman who's barely keeping it together in Buffalo. Her father is slipping into dementia, her job is joyless, her romantic life a catastrophe, and she's just been tossed from a jail cell in last night's clothes.
When her younger sister Simone (Milly Alcock), the golden child turned ghost, responds to Devon's pleas for help with a passive-aggressive edible arrangement, Devon reaches her limit.
Fuelled by resentment and a plastic fork, she heads to the coastal estate where Simone now lives, intent on dragging her sister home or at least ramming that fruit bouquet somewhere deeply unprintable.
But the confrontation Devon imagines never happens. What she finds instead is a bizarre and seductive microcosm of power and performance: Simone has reinvented herself as the personal assistant to Michaela Kell, known as "Kiki" to her acolytes.
Kiki is a sun-dappled socialite whose passions include raptor conservation, curated lingerie, and maintaining a cadre of eerily similar young women. She is married to hedge fund billionaire Peter (a laconic, weed-smoking Kevin Bacon), but her real bond is with Simone, who now wears pastel sundresses, sleeps in Kiki's bed, and mists her employer's underwear with lavender. Devon immediately concludes her sister has joined a cult. And she may be right.
What follows is part mystery, part satire, part hallucinogenic melodrama. Devon, battling sobriety and her own impulsive streak, begins investigating Michaela's world with increasing alarm.
There are whispers of Peter's missing first wife, a host of vacant-eyed assistants who speak in unison, and a house named "Cliff House" that might as well have "symbolic death trap" stencilled above the door.
Characters are arrested, birds are released or die horribly, secrets are teased, and falcons glide ominously past the mansion's picture windows. Oh, and there's a virtual assistant named Zeus, because of course there is.
If this sounds like a mess, that's because it almost is. Sirens is a maximalist, genre-colliding experiment that often teeters on the brink of tonal chaos. It is by turns a biting class satire, a camp mystery, a folkloric fever dream, and a deeply human story about two sisters caught in a lifelong seesaw of sacrifice and resentment.
The show is drenched in mythological references, some clever, others groan-worthy-and lit like a half-remembered dream, especially in early episodes directed by Nicole Kassell, who coats Moore in a perpetual soft-focus haze while letting Fahy stew in fluorescent realism.
Meghann Fahy anchors the show with a performance that is funny, caustic, and ultimately deeply moving. Devon is abrasive but vulnerable, furious but fragile, and Fahy captures every contradictory impulse without tipping into caricature. Milly Alcock, meanwhile, threads a difficult needle as Simone, a character who has submerged herself so deeply in someone else's fantasy that her own personality is barely visible.
And Moore? She's magnificent, chewing the scenery with surgical precision. Her Michaela is all smiles and serenity until she isn't-then, suddenly, she's terrifying. There are echoes of Kidman here, but Moore brings something colder, less ethereal and more calculated.
Still, Sirens doesn't entirely stick the landing. The satire of extreme wealth feels scattershot and occasionally superficial; the mystery elements, while entertaining, rarely pay off in satisfying way and supporting characters, particularly the household staff played by Felix Solis, Lauren Weedman, and Britne Oldford, feel like they wandered in from a sharper, more grounded series and never got a rewrite.
Even the musical score, dreamy and eerie at first, begins to blur into background static by the final hour.
Yet despite its excesses and sometimes because of them, Sirens is never boring. In fact, it's addictive. It's five tightly packed episodes move with manic energy, pulling you through a story that oscillates wildly between absurdity and pathos.
You may laugh at it, roll your eyes at its pretensions, or question its mythological metaphors, but you'll keep watching. And by the end, when the final pieces fall into place with a mix of dread and catharsis, you'll realise Sirens has managed something rare: it has taken a story of trauma, guilt, and sisterhood, dressed it in absurdity, and somehow made it sing.
The show ends as it began - with falcons overhead and danger on the cliffs - but now the real peril is emotional, not symbolic. Beneath its glossy surface and bonkers plot twists, Sirens is a story about the lengths we go to protect the people we love, even when we don't understand them, and the damage we carry from the roles we were assigned too early in life.
Whether it returns for a second season or vanishes into Netflix's content graveyard, Sirens has made its noise. And it's a siren song worth answering.