If you ever wished you had a twin, watching Sanctuary will rid you of that wish forever.
Sanctuary, which premieres Thursday on the subscription service Sundance Now and is not to be confused with an earlier TV series of the same name, follows a young Swedish woman named Helena (Josefin Asplund) down a long and creepy road that puts her in ever-escalating mortal danger.
She was placed on that road by her twin sister Siri, also played by Asplund. And to get the inevitable joke out of the way first, because very little about Sanctuary lends itself to humor, this Siri has no connection to the helpful voice on your iPhone.
The first episode of the eight-part series, which would be generally described as psycho-horror without supernatural elements, sets up the show’s somewhat unlikely, but dramatically compelling, premise.
Helena works in tech support, which looks as drab as the cold and grey Swedish winter. She has recently suffered a loss in her life, so she’s feeling depressed anyway, and she has a world-class jerk for a boss.
So even though she has long been estranged from Siri, her interest is piqued when Siri invites her to come to visit her at a “resort” in the Alps.
When Helena arrives, the place looks a lot brighter than anything else in her life, though it seems to have unusually strict security. Her phone and her passport are placed in a locker, and she is issued a visitor’s badge.
Siri seems delighted to see her, though the other people don’t seem very promising. There’s a “Doctor” Redpath (Will Mellor) who turns out to be the head of the aforementioned security. There’s a next-door neighbor named Margot (Barbara Marten) whom you would not invite over for tea.
And there’s the head of the place, Dr. Fisher (Matthew Modine), who is elusive.
It’s soon clear that the “resort” is actually a tightly secured compound, and Siri isn’t there for her health.
Siri does, however, have a plan. She wants Helena to pretend to be Siri for a day so Siri can slip away into the outside world and take care of some personal business.
Helena declines. But Siri carries out the plan anyway, while Helena is sleeping, and it quickly becomes clear Siri is not coming back.
Helena figures she’ll simply tell the staff she isn’t Siri, and they’ll send her on her way. Oops. Dr. Fisher and company don’t believe her, which means that like it or not, she’s now living Siri’s life, compared to which repetitious tech support suddenly looks very appealing.
A bit more gradually, it turns out that Dr. Fisher created the “sanctuary” not to help extremely troubled people, but to study them.
Essentially, we have a psychopath pretending to study psychopaths. The result is that someone like Helena is at the mercy of the “medical” staff, which seems to view its clientele as no less expendable than the mice used in studies and experiments at other types of labs.
Sanctuary gets creepy fast and maintains the pace. There are points at which it feels like Stephen King, or maybe The Handmaid’s Tale since Helena seems trapped with no chance of help or rescue.
Asplund makes Helena’s plight compelling. On a good day, it’s frustrating. On a bad day, it’s terrifying. If you like tense television that might give you nightmares, Sanctuary is it. Just don’t watch it with your twin.