The Sister, episode 1, review: Tovey makes a fine leading man, but Carvel brings the chills

Neil Cross knows how to craft an opening. They may have been acquired tastes, but the early minutes of any series of Luther pulsed with unpleasantness, and Hard Sun combined a pulverising fist fight with the imminent end of the world. The Sister (ITV) boasted another gripping, if more straightforward preface: in 2013 Nathan Redman (Russell Tovey) poured pills on a table, ready to overdose before being stopped in his tracks by a televised appeal for Elise (Simone Ashley), a woman who had vanished three years earlier.

Supernatural overtones began to creep in through Bertie Carvel’s bedraggled, spectral paranormalist Professor Bob Morrow, an aficionado of static-drenched “recordings” of the dead, who gets the plot going when he turns up on Nathan’s doorstep one dark and stormy night in 2020. Nathan’s unwanted past acquaintance arrived bearing one of those tapes and associated bleak tidings: a body – belonging, we were to assume, to Elise – was about to be disinterred along with their guilty secrets, thanks to a new housing development. Complicating matters further: the arrival of Holly (Amrita Acharia), Elise’s sister and Nathan’s wife of seven years.

For so long a reliable ensemble player, Tovey gets an overdue lead here and proved well up to the task as a solemn, anguished everyman. The attraction between Nathan and Holly felt more elusive than his own deeply felt torment, while the chronological jiggery-pokery was overused and eventually irritating, serving merely to slow the pace with the menacing atmosphere already close to suffocating.

Fortunately the drama jolted into life whenever Carvel was on screen. His magnificently malign performance, fit to rank alongside his recent TV turns in The Pale Horse and Baghdad Central or even his much-garlanded Miss Trunchbull from the Matilda musical, turned this hokum into evocatively sinister fare for Hallowe’en week.