‘How to Get to Heaven from Belfast’ Review: Small-Town Secrets Never Stay Buried (Netflix)

Lifelong friends from a Catholic school in Belfast, the four women at the center of the new series from the creator of Derry Girls have taken very different personal and professional paths, but they’ve remained close—except for one they haven’t seen in years. What binds them, at least on the surface, is a dark incident from their past involving fire, a death, and more than a few secrets—soon to be joined, it seems, by another death.

Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher), Robyn (Sinéad Keenan), and Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) are the three who still keep in touch, now two decades after leaving school. Dara is an eccentric, closeted lesbian who lives in a near-constant state of anxiety. Robyn has become a stay-at-home mother in an affluent household, busy raising her three children. And Saoirse—the closest thing the show has to a central protagonist—is a producer on a true crime TV series called Murder Code. The missing piece is Greta (Natasha O’Keeffe), who stayed behind in their hometown and hasn’t been seen in years. The shock comes when they receive news that Greta has died in an accident, prompting the three to return home for the wake and funeral.

Two things quickly become clear: the group is bound together by a formative adolescent incident—one that seems to have affected Greta most deeply—and that she may not be quite as dead as everyone claims. Her eccentric family insists on a closed coffin, but Saoirse can’t resist taking a quick look inside to reassure the others. From that moment on, the three women begin experiencing increasingly risky, strange, or uncomfortable situations that may be happening in their heads, in reality, or simply as a side effect of bingeing far too much true crime.

As the episodes unfold, the show’s eccentricity ramps up—and unfortunately, that’s not where How to Get to Heaven from Belfast is at its strongest. The investigative plotline starts to resemble a particularly convoluted episode of Scooby-Doo—amusing for a while, but only just. Things soon spiral, as they inevitably do in small towns where nothing stays buried for long. The women go from family friends to witnesses, and from there—who knows?—perhaps even suspects. What’s really happening in the present, and what exactly took place twenty years earlier to connect it all? As in Yellowjackets a series it shares certain structural similarities with, past traumas bleed into the present, with the narrative splitting across two distinct timelines separated by two decades.

What the series loses in an occasionally absurd crime plot, it gains in local texture: the characters, the pubs, the police stations, and the conversations among the ever-intense, unmistakably Irish inhabitants of County Donegal, up near the northern border between Ireland and, it sometimes feels, the edge of nowhere. It’s unlikely that Lisa McGee’s new show will have the cultural impact of Derry Girls, but the world it portrays is closely connected to that one—especially in its portrait of adolescent girls stumbling into situations they’re hardly prepared to handle, at least at first.