Wayward - Rebels, review: a community where nothing is as it seems

The bucolic town of Tall Pines appears, at least on the surface, as the progressive community par excellence, the ideal place for those who desire a quiet life. When Alex Dempsey, a trans police officer transitioning from woman to man, moves there with his pregnant wife Laura, no one seems surprised; in fact, the couple is welcomed in the best possible way. Alex's gender identity seems to pose no problem, and the future ahead of them appears bright and trouble-free.

But in the heart of the nearby forest, there is an institution for troubled teens, and on his very first day on duty, Alex encounters one of them, who has secretly escaped from that peculiar school, run by the mysterious Leanne, a former hippie who hides disturbing secrets within those walls. The arrival of two new girls, best friends, who ended up there by chance or necessity, generates new events, and Alex will, despite himself, discover frightening truths about the town.

Wayward: There's Very Little Rebellious About It

There's a hidden promise in every story that uses mystery as its starting premise: to draw the viewer into a spiral of paranoia, forcing them to doubt everything and every character. When this promise isn't properly kept, what remains is an empty shell, a superficial vision where the narrative mechanism spins idly, merely following an artificial scheme that gradually strips credibility from the events.

Wayward - Rebels, an eight-episode Canadian series that presented itself with the credentials of a claustrophobic mystery and the enormous talent of Toni Collette in the role of a guru-villain, unfortunately risks collapsing into this narrative limbo. It configures itself as a work that wants to promise endless revelations but is actually quite predictable, making it complicated rather than complex, ostentatious rather than layered, overdoing it when it would have been better to streamline the story and the events within it. 

Let's set aside the forced handling of the main couple, that trans police officer and his pregnant wife who also has several skeletons in her closet. The investigative component particularly suffers in the management of the various plot twists, with the classic cult situations being resolved far too superficially, with a couple of flashbacks in different episodes accompanying us through the genesis of that idyllic town built on falsehoods and omertà.

Growing Up in a World That Doesn't Grow

Where Wayward - Rebels occasionally hits the mark is in its handling of the adolescent protagonists, confined in that corrective institution of horrors and errors, while the outside world – starting with parental figures too cynical and absent to be truly credible – either deliberately ignores or is knowingly complicit. Developing bonds, some of which are merely introduced and others cut short when they shouldn't have been, with the friendship between Leila and Abbie aiming to be the emotional core of the story, only to descend into clichéd and improbable situations, especially in the final episode.

The series multiplies subplots and secondary characters almost compulsively, but forgets to delve into their psychologies, and the epilogue is anything but conclusive, leaving far too many unanswered questions even without explicitly being open to potential continuations.

Created by Mae Martin, a Canadian comedian who identifies as non-binary and here plays the character of the young police officer about to become a father, Wayward - Rebels aims to combine more dramatic and tense instincts with others that are over-the-top and of a ironic and satirical bent, but fails to find the right balance between its two souls.