“How to Get to Heaven from Belfast” is the Funniest Murder Mystery You’ve Ever Seen
In 2018, Lisa McGee created Derry Girls. Its premise was simple: four Irish girls and one British boy come of age in Ireland in the 1990s. As is the case with most teen comedies, Derry Girls found its humor in the absurdity of being a teenager consumed with the trials and tribulations of adolescence in the midst of far more pressing issues. Derry Girls is as silly as it is poignant and it made McGee a worldwide household name. Now she returns to Netflix with another original series, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast.
Cr. Christopher Barr/Netflix
The eight-episode series follows friends Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne), Robyn (Sinéad Keenan), and Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher). They grew up together at school, but have since diverged. Saoirse is a popular writer for a television series, Robyn is a stay-at-home mom, and Dara spends her time caring for her mother. Despite leading wildly different lives, they remain extremely close. Back in their schoolgirl days, there was one other friend in the mix: Greta (Natasha O’Keeffe). Something happened back then that fractured the foursome irrevocably. Now, Dara, Robyn, and Saoirse find themselves on the receiving end of an email that informs them of Greta’s death. At the wake, the friends get an eerie feeling that something fishy happened to Greta and they set out to get to the bottom of their once-friend’s suspicious death.
How to Get to Heaven from Belfast is one of those shows that’s inherently meant for binging in that it enraptures you from the first episode and you keep hitting Next Episode into the wee hours of the morning. It’s addictively funny and feels very much like an extension of Derry Girls without having anything to do with McGee’s former project. The dark, quickly-lobbed jokes are McGee’s calling cards, and How to Get to Heaven from Belfast happily doles them out at some of the most inappropriate, and occasionally appropriate, times. Everyone is on their toes, ready to poke, prod, and pester in the name of a laugh.
Cr. Christopher Barr/Netflix
There’s a death at the center of all this, so it’s not all jokes. The look of How to Get to Heaven from Belfast blends the serious surrealism of Twin Peaks with the side-effects of a weed gummy. Things are slightly off, but in a way that will make you chuckle if you’re having a good trip or send you down a dark rabbit hole if you’re having a bad one. It’s small, rainy Irish towns mixed with the garish, cutting light of a neon sign. Sometimes the smile of a friendly shopkeeper is nice, at others there’s something brewing beneath the surface. How to Get to Heaven from Belfast will keep the viewer guessing, and laughing, to the very end.
“We were very close. Once,” Saoirse says about her friendship with Greta. From a narrative perspective, there’s something juicy about the fallout of a relationship like this. Especially when the viewer realizes there’s a secret from their high school days they promised to never speak of. No secret can ever make it to the grave, and How to Get to Heaven from Belfast delights in what happens when that secret comes back to life. All of this is possible because of the three friends, their estranged high school pal, and the unsaid things that exist between them. What does it mean to have spent years knowing someone, only to become virtual strangers? How do you reconcile that when they might be dead? How to Get to Heaven from Belfast tackles those grand ideas with a wee little joke and a hearty dash of mystery.
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