‘That Night’ Review: Three Sisters, One Dead Cop, and a Vacation Gone Very Wrong (Netflix)

In this crime series, the lives of three Spanish sisters take a sudden turn one night in the Dominican Republic. Initially told with a light, almost comic touch before gradually turning into something darker, That Night follows the Arbizu sisters and what happens after one of them runs over a man on a dark road near the beaches of Punta Cana. The attempt to cover up the accident—and, at the same time, figure out what really happened—drives the six episodes that follow.

The show plays with multiple timelines and shifting points of view that constantly reframe what the audience has already seen. An event shown one way in the first episode, narrated by one of the sisters, changes in the next, and again in the one after that, depending on who is telling the story. At first the narrative unfolds like a puzzle, gradually building intrigue and mystery. But around the midpoint—once the pieces start falling into place—that tension begins to fade, and the plot slowly loses momentum, drifting into narrative territory that strains plausibility.

The first narrator is Cris (Paula Usero), the middle sister, a sweet but somewhat naïve young woman who moved to the Dominican Republic after becoming obsessed with the large number of stray dogs there and deciding she wanted to rescue them. The three sisters—along with Paula’s girlfriend, the eldest—had visited the island a year earlier and fallen in love with the place, though not quite as intensely as Cris did. The others went back to Spain while she stayed behind. A year later they return to visit her—bringing along Elena’s baby—and that’s when everything goes wrong.

One night Elena (Clara Galle) calls Cris in a panic from her car. When Cris arrives, Paula (Claudia Salas) is already there. They tell her that someone tried to rob Elena, that she defended herself, and that the attacker ended up under the wheels of her car. Cris immediately wants to call the police, but the others stop her. The problem? The dead man is a cop. And so begins a chaotic odyssey for the three sisters—each ill-equipped in her own way for something like this, whether through innocence, bad temper, or sheer clumsiness—as they try to hide what happened, get out of the country, and keep Paula’s partner from finding out.

By the second episode, narrated by Paula and focused on her own version of events, it becomes clear that things didn’t happen exactly the way they were first presented to Cris. By the third, when Elena finally tells her side of the story, it’s obvious the situation is far more complicated—and darker—than anyone initially thought. Add to that the fact that none of the three has the slightest aptitude for crime, and it quickly becomes clear that getting away with all of this will be no easy task. Along the way, That Night complicates the plot with elements tied to the sisters’ tragic family history, their fraught relationship with their father, and several personal secrets best left unspoiled.

For its first few episodes, the series has a certain energy, pace, and even a bit of mischievous charm. Its lightness makes it easier to accept three characters—especially two of them—who are drawn in rather broad strokes. The problem is that they form possibly the worst trio imaginable for a crime cover-up: impulsive (the eldest), largely clueless about the real world (particularly the two younger sisters, for different reasons), and prone to making one mistake after another in a place where mistakes can carry serious consequences. At a certain point, when the series grows darker and more violent, that same dynamic starts working against it. Instead of remaining endearing, the characters risk becoming more frustrating than sympathetic.

Still, creator Jason George—working from a novel by Gillian McAllister—tries hard to make viewers empathize with three young women shaped by a painful family trauma, who tend to act first and think later, and whose bond is deeply marked by that shared past. But once they are dropped into a Latin American setting where the rules of dealing with tourists follow a very different logic, their slightly foolish innocence often borders on the irritating.

Taken with the breezy spirit of a vacation paperback, That Night is easy to watch and just as easy to forget. Its main strength lies in three committed performances from actresses who do what they can with roles that are, in truth, written rather simply. The show never leans fully into parody in the vein of the Coen brothers, but that might actually have been the better tonal choice for telling this story. Because if you take these characters too seriously, you may start feeling they deserve whatever trouble eventually comes their way.