The following review of Wayward on Netflix contains some spoilers.
Wayward, an eight-episode queer horror series on Netflix created by Mae Martin, opens with an escape. A young boy pulls himself through the window of a building in the night and runs to the property’s edge. A woman’s voice cuts through the sounds of his panting and heavy footsteps, echoing a verse that will soon become as disturbing for viewers to hear as it is for the young characters of this show. He pulls himself over a barbed-wire fence and eventually plummets into a swampy lake to evade his captors. In the lake? A door. An image that will also soon haunt viewers. In Tall Pines, the small Vermont town where Wayward is set, there is no escaping the damage adults do to teens, all in the name of supposedly undoing the damage adults do to teens.
The year is 2003. The boy will soon be dead. It’s difficult — if not impossible — to fully make it out of Tall Pines, a town defined and ultimately run by its eponymously named “school” for troubled teens that functions much more similarly to prison. Across the border in Toronto, we meet high school girls and best friends Abbie (Sydney Topliffe) and Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind). They care more about music, getting high, and being together than they do about going to class. They are, by all accounts, regular teens. Sure, a little damaged (Leila’s got a dead sister she metaphorically carries around with her) and a little disobedient (Abbie refuses to kowtow to her rich family’s expectations for her, but to be fair…her dad doesn’t really try to hide his disdain for her). But they are just kids acting out, sometimes encouraging each other’s worst habits, as teens in these ultra close friendships often do. The adults in their lives, though, see them as something worse, as wholly broken menaces to society. Abbie ends up forcibly shipped off to Tall Pines, and when Leila follows her there in an ill-advised but loving rescue attempt, she ends up pushed into the Tall Pines system, too, where kids from all walks of life are forced to adhere to strict codes of conduct and ascend their way through a series of “levels” designed supposedly to help them achieve their highest selves, accompanied by “therapy” methods that even the teens know are rooted in junk science.
If it sounds like a cult, it is. And it’s all run by Evelyn, a woman who looks like she walked straight out of the 1970s and into 2003. She’s played by Toni Collette — an inspired casting choice. Collette has the range to portray the character’s wickedness while still, somehow, making her human. It’s not that we ever feel for Evelyn or empathize with her choices; rather, her evil tendencies feel so believable, so reflective of the real world where too many adults think teens must be controlled, manipulated, and formed into some sort of dutiful soldier. Her kind of evil is the human kind. She’s power-hungry and obsessed with the idea of suppressing anything remotely perceived as free will or rebellion in children. She’s not unlike the Moms for Liberty.
(Side note: If I don’t see Evelyns this Halloween, I’ll be sorely disappointed.)
While most of our teen protagonists are desperately trying to get out of Tall Pines, our two adult protagonists — married couple Alex (Mae Martin) and Laura (Sarah Gadon) — are actually moving to this strange place. Laura, who is pregnant, is a graduate of Tall Pines, and she has told her husband very little about her past and this place. Alex is a trans dude and also a cop. I spent much of my time watching the series trying to figure out if the writing decision to make his character a cop pays off in any meaningful way. Sure, the series is far from celebratory of the police. The local cops are just one violent cog in the whole violent machine of the Tall Pines project. But it feels at times as if Alex is here to be the “one good cop,” a trope that rarely lands and often actively works against any critique of policing in a narrative. He seems to be a cop mostly for the sake of servicing the plot, but I can’t help but think there would have been other ways to position him as the investigative outsider to the world of Tall Pines.
Considering he’s a small-town cop in 2003, Alex’s transness is pretty chill. No one else in town seems to bat an eye at it, and he casually talks about his T shots and other everyday aspects of trans life. Many of the show’s characters are queer, including bisexual teen Leila and one of the school’s guards (and Evelyn’s main foot soldier) Rabbit. Queerness and transness are not presented as problems to be solved in Wayward. Tall Pines Academy doesn’t pray the gay away. More accurately, it drugs and tortures the soul away. The choice to make Wayward less about queerness and more about obsessive control over all teens’ autonomy works quite well. It’s a stark reminder that the real-world targeting of queer and trans kids does in fact hurt all kids in their abilities to express themselves and live freely.
The series is at its best when really leaning into its horror elements, epitomized in episode six (six through eight is the strongest stretch by far, and the ending is so thoroughly haunting), when Evelyn forcibly makes Leila relive the day her sister died, the past and present merging in disturbing ways. In general, the series harnesses some of the same strengths as Yellowjackets, particularly in the way it lays breadcrumbs for supernatural potential. The hold Evelyn has over her followers, the doors, the memory disruptions, the toads croaking — there’s so much to suggest something supernatural is afoot, but for all its horror and surreal devices, Wayward is starkly rooted in reality. Just as Yellowjackets shows, the destabilizing effects of trauma can sometimes be experienced as the supernatural. Far too many reform schools like the one depicted operate in this country with little oversight. Many target queer and trans teens specifically. Wayward is not some work of science-fiction; it captures real-life horror and, despite its 2003 setting, feels achingly of-the-moment considering present-day rampant attempts to indoctrinate, control, and punitively punish youth as a tool of fascism.
The cult mentality that rules Tall Pines is predicated on the belief that intergenerational trauma can be broken, but it also relies on the same methods of dominance, rules, and punishment to supposedly undo those horrors, breaking patterns by reinforcing new ones. Sydney Topliffe and Alyvia Alyn Lind give standout performances as the series’ central “troubled” teens, depicting Abbie and Leila as fully realized characters, giving them all the depth and agency the fictional adults on the show try to stamp out. Sarah Gadon’s performance is subtle, Laura’s behavior gradually becoming more unnerving to both Alex and the viewer.
Wayward gives just enough of the town’s backstory and the roots of its mystery to provide enough narrative scaffolding without becoming overly bogged down by the worldbuilding and mythology. At the end of the day, it’s not hard to imagine why this town operates the way it does. Attempts to control youth are baked into this country’s penal history. Wayward just takes those nightmarish realities and makes them more on-the-nose. Even when the writing isn’t at its tightest, the result is quite terrifying.
The thing that messed with my head the most was seeing Mae with anyone but George. Their chemistry was palpable in “Feel Good”.