A wealthy woman’s world unravels in this sharp, shallow, and stylishly sinister whodunnit filled with feuding sisters and penthouse paranoia

There’s blood on the floor and designer drapes at the windows in The Better Sister, a glossy new thriller that opens with a corpse and wastes no time slapping high society across the face. Jessica Biel leads as Chloe Taylor, a ruthless magazine editor whose perfect life – complete with Manhattan skyline views and a petulant teenager – implodes when her husband turns up dead.

Said husband, Adam Macintosh (Corey Stoll), wasn’t exactly a beloved figure. Whether it’s the shady company he kept or the toxic secrets he harboured, his death feels less like a tragedy and more like a narrative inevitability. The murder, though, sets off a sleekly entertaining game of Clue: Luxury Apartment Edition, full of scheming bosses, dubious teens, and a sister with serious scores to settle.

Chloe returns from a dinner party to find Adam stabbed in their home – and rather suspiciously grabs the apparent murder weapon: her own penknife. Enter Ethan, her stepson (and Adam’s son), who immediately becomes the police’s prime suspect. False alibis, staged burglaries, and bloodstained secrets pile up as detectives dig into the family’s serpentine past.

Just when things can’t get messier, in struts Elizabeth Banks as Nicky – Adam’s ex-wife, Chloe’s estranged sister, and Ethan’s birth mother. Nicky is the unruly counterpoint to Chloe’s polished control: wild, irreverent, and unfiltered (“camel toe that can be seen from outer space” being one of her subtler lines). She may have lost custody years ago due to addiction, but when the law says she’s still Ethan’s guardian, the stage is set for a sibling showdown wrapped in resentment and buried trauma.

The dynamic between Biel and Banks drives the series forward, swerving between genuine emotional depth and bitchy banter. One moment, they’re revisiting shared childhood pain; the next, they’re flinging jibes in penthouse lighting. This love-hate seesaw injects needed energy into a show that sometimes strains under its own sheen.

While The Better Sister toys with dark humour – occasionally tossing out zingers about murdered-husband emojis or corporate creepiness – it doesn’t fully commit to being a black comedy. The tonal balance wobbles, leaning too often into a generic glossiness that leaves the show looking more like an interiors catalogue than a nail-biting mystery.

Yet the series is undeniably bingeable. It’s a functional whodunnit, thick with red herrings, mystery phone calls, and enough suspects to fill a brunch table in the Hamptons. The eventual twist is satisfyingly unforeseeable, and the show’s real hook isn’t who killed Adam – it’s watching all these beautiful people unravel in style.

The Better Sister fits neatly into streaming’s now-standard formula: wealthy, seemingly perfect women in stylish homes brought low by secrets and crimes. Think Big Little Lies or The Undoing, but with fewer beach walks and more passive-aggressive brunches. It’s schadenfreude TV at its most aspirational, where viewers are invited to revel in rich people’s ruin while admiring their kitchen islands.

The moral may be hollow, but it’s an effective trick: remind us that success hides dysfunction, beauty masks brutality, and those who appear to have it all might, in fact, have the most to lose. Whether this offers real catharsis or just well-lit escapism is up for debate. But when Biel and Banks go toe-to-toe amid the wreckage of family, fame, and finance, it’s hard not to be entertained.