Just in time for the annual corporate-sanctioned month of fear, better known as October, Netflix has gifted us Wayward, an eight-episode miniseries that manages to be equal parts horror, comedy, and “what the hell did I just watch?” The show arrives courtesy of Mae Martin, a Canadian stand-up comic whose ability to pivot from punchlines to existential dread proves that comedians, when they go dark, often out-horror the horror directors. (Think Jordan Peele, but with more maple syrup and self-deprecation.)
Let’s be clear from the start. This is not Wayward Pines. No Shyamalan twists. No forest conspiracy cults. Instead, Wayward feels like what would happen if Ari Aster, yes, Hereditary Ari Aster, was handed a stack of Judy Blume novels and told to make them deeply upsetting. The setting is the suspiciously quaint Tall Pines, a town where everyone knows everyone, and everyone waves, and everyone would probably lend you sugar, before locking you in a basement and asking you to recite scripture backwards. Think Stars Hollow, if Stars Hollow had a headmaster played by Toni Collette and zero coffee shops.
The plot, Alex Dempsey (played by Martin), a newly relocated police officer, moves to Tall Pines with his pregnant wife Laura (Sarah Gadon, delivering a performance that blooms as the series gets weirder). Alex, a trans man, is wary about how the small town will receive him, a tension the series handles with both sensitivity and sharp humor. But his anxieties are soon dwarfed by something much stranger, students at Tall Pines Academy keep escaping, muttering tales of psychological torture and cult-like rituals that make Scientology look like a Pilates class.
Enter Lelia (Alyvia Alyn Lind) and her best friend Abbie (Sydney Topliffe), who are sent off to the Academy by well-meaning parents who believe the school teaches “life skills.” Instead, the girls discover that the curriculum is equal parts John Carpenter fever dream and Quentin Tarantino monologue exercise, with a splash of demonic Sunday school thrown in for fun. Picture a truth-telling circle so intense you’ll wish you’d lied more in high school.
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Collette, meanwhile, devours every frame as Evelyn Wade, the headmaster who delivers menace with the kind of effortless elegance that makes you want to simultaneously applaud and leave the room immediately. Is there a genre she hasn’t conquered? She’s basically the Beyoncé of dread.
Each episode doles out secrets like breadcrumbs, leading us deeper into the nightmare until we’re unsure if the horror belongs to the Academy itself or the entire community of Tall Pines. The series pulls the neat trick of making you doubt not only the characters’ reality but your own, too, exactly the kind of existential dread one hopes for while eating Halloween candy in bed.
Performances across the board sing. Martin, dropping the comedic armor for raw drama, is fantastic. Lind and Topliffe nail the particular agony of teenage friendship under duress (and cult indoctrination). Gadon shines as Laura, a character whose story quietly becomes the most disturbing of all. And Collette? Please. Just hand her the award. She is genre royalty.
The result is a miniseries that manages to scare you, make you laugh nervously, and then scare you again, usually in the same scene. Wayward is exactly the kind of show you start at midnight and regret at 3 a.m., but only because you can’t stop watching.
