The Crow Girl season two

Most crime dramas returning for a second series spend half an episode setting the scene. The Crow Girl returns as though it had never stopped. Season two begins barely an hour after the first ended, carrying its characters straight from one crisis into the next, before wounds have healed or relationships have had time to settle into a more convenient shape. It is an unusually effective way to resume the story: the tension survives intact, while Milly Thomas’s screenplay is free to deepen what is already there rather than construct another elaborate beginning. Old conversations return with altered meanings; details planted almost inconspicuously begin to press forward; plotlines that once appeared separate gradually reveal themselves as parts of the same design.

DCI Jeanette Kilburn (Eve Myles) is drawn into another grisly investigation, while psychotherapist Sophia Craven (Katherine Kelly) finds herself pulled back towards her former patient Victoria Burkeman (Clara Rugaard). The case supplies the narrative drive, but Jeanette and Sophia remain the real centre of the series. With almost no time having elapsed, their relationship cannot be tidied up between seasons or explained retrospectively. It develops before us, through withheld remarks, charged glances and minute changes in who seems to understand whom. There is something almost voyeuristic about the attention paid to them: the camera watches the relationship form at the same time as the women themselves are trying to work out what it is.

The imagery is knowingly allusive. Clinical settings, mutilated bodies and the grotesque use of livestock place the series firmly within the tradition of classical psychological horror, with The Silence of the Lambs an unmistakable influence throughout. Jeanette’s office is stranger and more elegant, with its well-coordinated hues and carefully composed, faintly claustrophobic interiors shot from low angles that recall the way Rosemary’s Baby makes domesticity feel dangerous.

Myles gives Jeanette a clipped, no-nonsense authority, while allowing the pressure she is under to come through in small, unguarded moments. Kelly has the more difficult role and gives the stronger performance, making Sophia’s poise feel fragile and volatile at once, without reducing her to a collection of symptoms. Rugaard, meanwhile, keeps Victoria watchful and difficult to read. At times, the episodes subject their characters to so much fresh horror that the audience risks becoming desensitised. Yet Thomas remains deft at letting secrets surface by degrees, with each revelation changing both the case and the relationships around it.

Christina Yang

The Crow Girl season two is released on Paramount+ on 20^th July 2026.

Watch the trailer for The Crow Girl season two here: