Canneseries 2025 Review: HOW TO KILL YOUR SISTER, Almost Deadly Road Trip in Belgian Darkish Dramedy Series
Anna (Emma Rotsaer) arrives at her sister Kat’s (Marjan De Schutter) secluded estate with a wooden coffin secured to the roof of her car. The reunion is strained; the sisters have not seen each other since the death of their parents eight years earlier. Kat, who lives in isolation behind a gated property and initially refuses to answer the intercom, receives Anna with evident reluctance. Anna reveals the reason for her unannounced visit: she has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Kat breaks silence and goes out.
The Belgian series How to Kill Your Sister does not open on an entirely somber note. Created by Pedro Elias and Evelien Broekaert, written by Elias, Broekaert and Jonas Geirnaert, and directed by Geirnaert, the series begins with a madcap flashback: Anna and Kat’s parents steal a Buddha statue and flee during a vacation.
How to Kill Your Sister shifts between past and present, returning to the family's road trip to Spain with father Frank (Nico Sturm) and mother Judith (Sofie Decleir). Frank is immature yet generally good-natured, while Judith plays the more responsible role, though she often goes along with Frank’s impulsive schemes. Among the daughters, Kat initially seems the more introverted, but during the journey she becomes increasingly impulsive and unpredictable. At times more so than the extroverted Anna.
Anna’s return to Kat marks the beginning of one final road trip from Belgium to Spain. The journey is not only a tribute to their late parents but also a farewell: Anna intends to end her life at the site of their childhood memories, provided Kat helps her.
Much like their earlier family travels, the trip quickly unravels in unexpected and often absurd directions, as Anna seeks to understand why Kat abandoned her after their parents died. At the same time, Kat’s personal circumstances come into focus. She appears to be trapped in a marriage with a highly controlling husband, a situation underscored by her anxious reaction to his calls and her reliance on anti-anxiety medication.
How to Kill Your Sister unfolds around long-buried secrets. The sisters are not brought together by a sentimental desire to reconnect but by a volatile mix of resentment and unresolved grief. Their interactions are marked by confrontation rather than reconciliation.
Kat remains evasive about her marriage and home life, while Anna’s motivations suggest a level of manipulation beneath her vulnerability. The circumstances surrounding their parents’ deaths are never fully disclosed, leaving a persistent sense of ambiguity. This tension is heightened by the recurring flashbacks to the parents’ crazy escapades, which serve as both comic relief and a reminder of their more carefree lives.
The road trip provides ample space to explore the dynamics of sisterhood and family life, as How to Kill Your Sister navigates a careful balance between comedy and drama. Although the reunion is set against a backdrop of terminal illness and estrangement, the writing allows room for moments of levity.The series leans less on dark humor than on the discomfort of awkward encounters. In one scene, Kat and Anna share a nostalgic moment beneath a tree, reminiscing about their parents, only to be interrupted by a man in pajamas perched on a branch, waiting to hang himself.
Despite its provocative title, How to Kill Your Sister is a dramedy that draws on family nostalgia amid bleak circumstances to recover traces of long-buried sentiment. Yet creators Pedro Elias, Evelien Broekaert, and Jonas Geirnaert avoid the familiar tropes of feel-good reunion stories.
Instead, they opt for a series of irreverent, often absurd episodes that steer clear of overt sentimentality. The sisters’ journey becomes less about reconciliation with each other and more about confronting their own unresolved histories. As the road trip unfolds, it takes a therapeutic turn, particularly for Kat, whose suppressed impulses resurface when a good samaritan deed goes haywire. They gave somewhat unwillingly a ride to a pair of pushy Dutch seniors stranded in their caravan. After the girls suspect that they stole Anna´s purse, Kat gives them a good a wild ride in their ramshackle caravan.
Anna, the more irreverent of the two, finds herself unwittingly cast as a getaway driver when Kat stumbles into the middle of a shop robbery. “You, with the cancer, drive!” shouts the young thief, prompting a stunned reaction from Anna, not because they are now accomplices to a crime, but because Kat disclosed her diagnosis to a stranger.
In How to Kill Your Sister, family history is reframed through a lens of absurdity, as the estranged sisters are forced to confront their past in order to make sense of their present. Elias, Broekaert, and Geirnaert employ the road movie format to full effect making the sisters bump into a cadre of odd characters that serve to unearth long-suppressed secrets.
These revelations gradually expose how past choices have shaped the protagonists’ current lives. While the series occasionally veers toward sentiment, it consistently subverts it through chaotic detours and darkly comic twists. Just as in their childhood road trips, any moment of somber or nostlagic rememberance is quickly disrupted by the unexpected. In addition, Kat is not sure she wants to become complicit in a assisted suicide of her sister which is another dilemma the sisters have to deal with on the trip with another twist.
