Yellowjackets
Paramount+
In this visceral american tv drama, survival is double-edged, literally: following a plane crash that strands a girls’ high-school soccer team in the wilderness, one of the teens wields an axe for an emergency amputation. With an alternating then-and-now structure – between the gruesome events at ground zero in 1996 and the trauma-laden lives of the survivors in 2021 – the first season of this series is a horror-stoked mystery. When you have to take extreme measures to stay alive, the evocative storytelling insinuates, you can never truly be saved.
As the very cold opener makes clear, with a teenage girl running for her life through a snowy forest before her unexpected pursuer is sighted, something went horribly wrong among the young adults who exited the ruptured fuselage. Present-day enquiries reveal that it was 19 months until the New Jersey teens were found, enough time for a new societal structure to take root. Animal-hide masks, forest rituals and sizzling flesh all indicate that social norms, and the bond of friendship, gave way to something darker. The path there, shrewdly doled out, is mostly enthralling.
“After they rescued us, I lost my purpose,” notes the adult Natalie ( Juliette Lewis), exiting her latest stint in rehab. Even if the women at the centre of the story don’t want to talk about what happened, they can’t hide the impact. Natalie is an extreme version of her teenage rebel self (Sophie Thatcher), whereas Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) has buried herself so far in the suburban doldrums, complete with a dismissive daughter and marriage counselling sessions, that she’s starting to embrace the possibilities of her adolescent odyssey. Misty (Christina Ricci), the squad’s put-upon coaching assistant, is a cheerful sociopath; when an armed Natalie accosts her she smiles with genuine delight.
Creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson (both graduates of Netflix’s drug cartel franchise Narcos) have crafted an involved dynamic among the characters: the teens are still taking shape, but the decisions they make before the disaster feed into what happens afterwards. There’s a camaraderie among the young women such that their stirring bromides of teamwork hint at the nightmarish. In this heady mix of folk horror and highschool betrayal, there’s also room for mordant humour. The geeky young Misty (Sammi Hanratty) takes charge at the crash site by declaring, “I took the Red Cross babysitter training class. Twice.”
Yellowjackets will get classified as a gender flip on Lord of the Flies, but it also weaves together strands that call on everything from the ominous conspiracies of Lost to the feminine otherworldliness of The Virgin Suicides. It is rife with pulp-like moments, right down to the young son of another survivor, the hard-nosed Taissa (Tawny Cypress), producing unnerving drawings, but it’s rarely messy. It has a juicy momentum, primed by skilful editing that ties the two settings together. The mid ’90s soundtrack may be era-specific, but the intent is timeless: what is left after you’ve lived life at the unspeakable extreme?