Tall Pines is, on the face of it, the perfect progressive community. When Alex Dempsey (Mae Martin), a trans cop, moves to remote Vermont with his pregnant wife Laura (Sarah Gadon), nobody bats an eyelid. More than that, his new partner from the local police department quickly assures him, correctly as it turns out, that he’ll be actively accepted and treated just like one of “the guys”. There’s a farmer’s market where locals sell their homemade chutneys, group outdoor yoga sessions, and a care package waiting when they move into the idyllic (and mysteriously rent-free) clapboard house in which they’ll start their new life. Alex’s gender identity is not a problem. Nothing, it seems, is a problem. So why does everything feel… off?
Netflix’s new eight-part thriller Wayward was also created and written by Martin, best known for their stand-up career and semi-autobiographical offbeat romcom Feel Good. Their comedic chops prove a real boon here; tonally, Wayward benefits from a sense of surreal, dark humour and bouncy pacing to offset all that cultish creepiness underpinning the narrative.
Characters are exaggerated to great effect, with horror powerhouse Toni Collette in her absolute element as Evelyn, the charismatic yet deeply unnerving founder of Tall Pines Academy – the town’s school for troubled teens. Evelyn is something of a cartoonish Seventies throwback, all long wavy hair and oversized tinted glasses as she cycles around town on a ridiculous recumbent bicycle. But she’s far from a figure of fun. Flipping between delivering warm, full-body hugs and gimlet-eyed, sub-zero stares with the speed of a switchblade, Collette plays Evelyn to spine-chilling perfection.
At Tall Pines Academy, cruel and unusual therapeutic techniques more akin to psychological warfare are dished out by suitably unhinged henchmen and women with names like Duck and Rabbit to break adolescents “free” from their old selves. Therapy-speak is weaponised in a manner all too familiar to those who’ve watched the rise of the modern armchair diagnosis on TikTok; there’s talk of “intergenerational trauma” and “identified patients”. “That’s the person in a family who holds the pain,” says Evelyn. “And that pain continues, until someone’s brave enough to feel it.” Suffice to say, the students are forced to feel it, whether they want to or not.
Into this melting pot of traumatised weirdos step best friends Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind) and Abbie (Sydney Topliffe), shipped across the border from Canada after their parents despair of their pot smoking and school skiving. They head up a stellar ensemble cast of young misfits; a particular stand-out is Isolde Ardies, who plays fractured zealot Stacey with skin-crawling perkiness.
Unlike plenty of the glossy-looking but thin thrillers so frequently served up by the streamers at present, Wayward offers something far more odd and entertaining. Thematically, it’s not a million miles from Hulu’s hokey Nine Perfect Strangers, in which Nicole Kidman’s wellness “guru” delivers a disturbingly unconventional retreat to an unwitting ensemble cast of guests – but here the concept is genuinely well executed, with characters who hold their own and enough well-timed twists to keep viewers hooked. It feels like an homage to influences that cross genres: there are elements of horror reminiscent of everything from Rosemary’s Baby (when Laura points out what she thinks is a tail on her foetus’s scan) and Ari Aster’s cult folk chiller Midsommar (in groping group embraces that resemble a singular organism as bodies collectively sway with emotion) to Darren Aronofsky’s unsettling, avant-garde Mother! (when the baby is finally born into a house full of overly invested bystanders). The students-slash-inmates’ getaway strategies, meanwhile, evoke The Great Escape; the idea of being misunderstood and locked away has the flavour of Girl, Interrupted.
But behind the missing children, mind games and eerie psychedelic rituals lies perhaps the biggest horror of all: living in a small town where everybody knows your business. As it turns out, being accepted isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There’s no such thing as a free homemade chutney, after all.
