@joelkeller Published March 13, 2026, 3:15 p.m. ET Where to Stream: That Night Powered by Reelgood More On: thrillers Is the James Van Der Beek Movie ‘The Gates’ Streaming on Netflix or Amazon Prime Video? Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sunny Nights’ On Hulu, Where Will Forte And D’Arcy Carden Are Americans Who Get Entangled With The Underworld In Sydney While Peddling Self-Tanning Spray Viola Davis’ Amazon MGM Thriller ‘Ally Clark’ Adds Jason Clarke To Cast ‘It Was Just an Accident’ Ending Explained: The Meaning Behind That Ambiguous Final Scene When a show like That Night, the new Netflix series from Spain, tells the same story from different perspectives, it’s sometimes hard to get more than a surface sketch of who the show’s main characters are. Sometimes, a clever storytelling conceit comes at the cost of really connecting with the story’s characters, which is what we saw here.
Opening Shot: A woman walks through a building with files on a cart. A baby’s picture is clipped to the folder. She sits down with a laptop and listens to recordings of women talking about a murder they were accused of.
The Gist: The women are the Abrizu sisters: Elena (Clara Galle), Paula (Claudia Salas) and Cris (Paula Usero), all from Pamplona, Spain, who were arrested and put on trial for a murder in the Dominican Republic.
We flash back to the D.R., where Cris has moved to a year after the three sisters visited on vacation. Seeing the plight of the island’s stray dogs, she decides to open up a shelter and clinic there, and a year later, Elena and Paula, along with Paula’s girlfriend Luisa (Nüll García), have returned for the grand opening.
Just as she’s closing the clinic for the night, she gets a call from Paula; Cris finds Paula’s and Elena’s rental cars on a rough beachside road. Apparently, according to Elena, she was held up at gunpoint but ended up running over the assailant, who lies dead under Elena’s car. They look at the man’s wallet and find out he works for the police.
Cris wants to report the incident, but the ever-practical Paula thinks the cops will side with the victim and keep Elena rotting in prison, where she won’t be able to take care of her infant daughter Ane. Paula’s idea is to bury the man, pretend to use his credit and debit cards, drive around so his phone pings off different towers, dispose of everything, then go back to Spain.
As they do this, we flash back to when the trio were there the prior year, with Cris falling in love with the island and its stray dogs, and Elena having sex with a random guy. When Cris decides to stay right as they arrive at the airport to leave, Paula is the loudest voice to cast doubts on whether her “hippie” sister is off the deep end or not.
Cris is reluctant to leave the clinic behind, but ends up doing so, as well as saying goodbye to her boyfriend Zahi (Raidher Díaz), which is when she finds out he was using her for her money.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? That Night, created by Jason George, reminds us of The Afterparty, another series where a death happens and everyone talks about the events from their own skewed perspective.
Our Take: What George and his writers have decided to do in That Night is plunge its main characters right into their terrible situation and then intersperse how they deal with it with flashbacks that explain more about their characters. What choosing that storytelling method does, though, is give viewers only the most superficial glimpses of the three sisters, putting them in broad categories that don’t really explain much about why they’re all taking a risk with hiding this body.
What we do know is that the three sisters, Luisa, their wealthy father, and even a grownup Ane are going to have their takes on the incident; in the case of Elena, Cris and Paula, each of them are going to demonstrate that whatever trust they had in each other as siblings will be shattered during this investigation. Each of them will have a different version of events, starting with how Elena actually came across this cop and ran him over.
Those perspectives will be colored by their various personalities: Cris being trusting and a bit naive, Elena being someone who’s flighty who doesn’t think things through, and Paula being as serious as a heart attack and highly organized. Their collective goal is to make sure that Ane doesn’t grow up without her mother, but it will be interesting to see how the story develops as the different perspectives are laid out.
But what we also hope happens is that the flashbacks shape their characters a bit more. We do see a flashback to their childhoods in Pamplona that indicate that their mother died tragically, and that the seeds of mistrust among the sisters were planted then. But we also want to see all three women become actual people instead of broad stereotypes, so we can connect with them more than we did during the first episode.
Performance Worth Watching: Claudia Salas has the best comic timing as the uber-practical Paula.
Sex And Skin: Elena and whoever she slept with a year prior to the accident make a lot of noise in the hotel room.
Parting Shot: When the police arrive at Paula and Elena’s hotel room, we hear Paula’s voice say, “Okay, Cris told you her version. Now I will tell you the truth.”
Sleeper Star: Nüll García’s Luisa has more to say about all this, given she’s the outsider in this group, and we’re looking forward to the episode where she gives her perspective.
Most Pilot-y Line: “I hope he’s using a condom,” Paula says about the man who’s having sex with Elena in the flashback. Quite the bit of foreshadowing, isn’t it?
Our Call: SKIP IT. We really had trouble connecting with the sisters and the sticky situation they get themselves into in That Night, and we don’t know if things are going to get better as we get deeper into this story.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
