Sirens Netflix Review: Family, Power, and the Cycles That Break Us
What if healing only meant becoming a better version of the person who hurt you?
Sirens Netflix Review Quick Take: Sirens is darkly comic, mysterious, and surprisingly sharp. Beneath the humor and absurdities lies a story about trauma bonding, family sacrifice, and the illusions of power and control. Sometimes surviving isn’t about strength—it’s about knowing when to let go.
The Facade of Power: When Survival Looks Like Success
At first glance, Sirens is all laughter, luxury, and witty dialogue as well as a glossy take on privilege and moral corrosion. But beneath the humor runs something more sinister: a study in trauma bonding and the masks we build to survive.
Simone, the younger sister, appears fragile, molded by years of abuse and neglect. Devon, the older sister, has built her life around protecting her, a self-imposed mission born from guilt after their mother’s suicide attempt and their father’s descent into alcoholism. But as the story unfolds, the power dynamic between them flips.
Simone absorbs everything she’s learned from Michaela, the wealthy, ruthless woman she works for and uses those lessons to seize control of Michaela’s world and her husband, Peter. What first looks like helplessness becomes calculated adaptation. The student doesn’t just learn from the master, she replaces her.
The Cost of Protection: When Love Becomes a Cage
Devon’s love for Simone is unconditional, but also suffocating. She sees her sister as the fragile child she once rescued, not as the woman capable of manipulation and ambition. Her protection becomes a form of imprisonment, a subtle reflection of how trauma convinces us that care and control are the same thing.
There’s a tragic irony in Devon’s sacrifices. She gave up college, her dreams, and her independence to raise Simone. She stayed with their father, Bruce, long after he succumbed to dementia and regret. She became the family’s caretaker, yet the one most trapped by its ghosts. In contrast, Simone learned to weaponize her own victimhood, turning it into a source of power.
The result is a haunting emotional reversal, the protector becomes powerless, and the “saved” becomes the savior, though not without moral compromise.
Sirens Netflix Review: The Psychology of the Cycle
By the final episode, the show circles back to its thesis: hurt people hurt people.
Simone, now mistress of the Cliff House empire, takes over Peter’s life the same way Michaela once did. History loops with chilling precision. Devon, meanwhile, boards a ferry with her father, a man broken by grief and drink as if she’s doomed to carry his unfinished suffering.
Even Michaela, stripped of status and love, shows remarkable grace. When she encounters Devon on the ferry, she reflects, “I had a good run. Thirteen years before he saw me as a monster.” Her acceptance feels like the show’s quiet truth: everyone in Sirens is both victim and villain, trapped in cycles of care, cruelty, and self-justification.
The final scene, the ferry cutting across grey waters, with the three generations adrift, feels like a metaphor for how families carry their sins like heirlooms. The past doesn’t die; it migrates.
Life Lessons Beneath the Laughter
For all its biting humor and absurd wealth, Sirens is a show about responsibility. It asks: how long can we keep blaming our trauma before it becomes a choice?
Devon’s life is defined by sacrifice, Simone’s by self-preservation. Both are survival strategies, but neither is healing. In contrast, Michaela’s downfall isn’t villainy — it’s inevitability. She becomes obsolete in a system that rewards reinvention over reflection.
The show’s dark brilliance lies in how it refuses to moralize. It understands that love can be manipulative, care can be corrosive, and healing often looks like betrayal.
Why Sirens Works
It works because it’s deceptively funny, morally uncomfortable, and psychologically precise. The show’s tone part Big Little Lies, part Succession, part tragic family folklore — keeps you laughing just long enough to miss the knife sliding in.
Its real magic is in the performances. Every look between Devon and Simone carries decades of shared pain and quiet competition. Even when the writing veers toward melodrama, the emotional truth stays sharp.
The series never tells us who to root for, and that’s its strength. Sirens doesn’t offer catharsis; it offers a mirror.
Final Thought: The Monsters We Inherit
In the end, Sirens isn’t about villains or heroes, it’s about inheritance. Emotional, psychological, generational. The father’s regret becomes the daughter’s self-sacrifice; the mother’s despair becomes the sister’s ambition.
And maybe that’s the point: we can’t always break the cycle, but we can learn to recognize it — and choose, however imperfectly, not to pass it on.
Related Reads
- Wayward Netflix Review: Utopia, Trauma, and the Illusion of Healing – explores control, resilience, and moral complexity.
- Black Rabbit Review – for those intrigued by cycles of trauma and power in modern storytelling.
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