‘How to Get to Heaven From Belfast’ series review: Sisterhood, suspense and sass come together in Lisa McGee’s humorous mystery

Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher), Robyn (Sinéad Keenan) and Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) have been close friends since school. Twenty years on, and in their late 30s now, they have remained close.

Saoirse is a successful writer with a hit television show, called Murder Code to her credit, and is all set to marry Seb (Tom Basden). Robyn is married to a man who adores her and has three children while Dara “does something in computers” and looks after her mum.

When the trio hear that a close friend from school, Greta (Natasha O’Keeffe), who they were estranged from after a scary event, is dead, they decide to go to the wake. When they get to the wake in Knockdara in Donegal, everything seems off and Greta’s family behave strangely.

Greta’s husband, Owen (Emmett J. Scanlan), is the police chief at Knockdara and seems to know more than he says. Is the body in the coffin, Greta or someone else? If it is someone else, where is Greta? How does Jodie (Selin Hizli) who seems to have met Greta the day she died, fit into all this?  

Do the present events have anything to do with the fire and the scary cabin in the woods 20 years ago? There is a sigil that the girls have tattooed on them which seems to pop up at inopportune times.  

Apart from multiple trips between Belfast and Donegal, the hunt for truth takes our amateur sleuths to a swanky resort in Portugal, to a nursing home, a lighthouse, and a ruined village called Caille Neamh where the veil between heaven and earth is thin.

A still from ‘How to Get to Heaven From Belfast’
| Photo Credit:
Netflix

There is a scary assassin-type person called Booker (Bronagh Gallagher) who invariably seems a hair’s breadth away from killing the friends or random others. While Booker is all business, her protégé, Feeney (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), with her taste for outrageous hair and makeup, and ice cream, is at the other end of the spectrum.

Saoirse feels her heart skip a beat every time she sees the handsome Knockdara policeman, Liam (Darragh Hand). We see Margo (Michelle Fairley), conducting psychological experiments on Greta when she was a child.

Apart from the mystery of Greta’s disappearance, there is also Andrew (Josh Finan) looking for his father, an investigative journalist, who disappeared 20 years ago, around the time of the fire in the cabin in the woods. That he looks eerily like Jason Meadows, Greta’s possibly abusive boyfriend, is yet another curveball.

While the mystery will not stand up to even casual scrutiny, and the final episodes go slightly haywire, Lisa McGee, who also is behind the popular period teen drama Derry Girls, has fun in her sandbox of social commentary, intergenerational trauma, and female friendships.

A still from ‘How to Get to Heaven From Belfast’
| Photo Credit:
Netflix

One cannot help but laugh when Dara has “an attack of the Catholics”, a landline is described as a “Portuguese ornament”, DNA is compared to Catholicism (“It doesn’t wash off”), and Dara’s comment when Saoirse talks of “Doubting Peters” (har har): “There’s lapsed Catholicism and then there’s you.”

The aerial shots of Ireland are breathtaking, the pop songs invigorating and nostalgic, the chaotic action bracing, and the many call backs to Derry Girls thrilling. The acting might sometimes tip into the unnecessarily loud, but overall it moves smoothly enough.

When all has been answered, including how to correctly pronounce Saoirse and the fact that Irish police are called the Garda, only one question remains, namely, what is in the pink bag, and that will only be answered in Season 2.

How to Get to Heaven From Belfast currently streams on Netflix

Published – February 18, 2026 01:08 pm IST