Yellowjackets Review: The Wilderness Is Only Half the Horror
★★★★☆ 4/5
A gripping, ferociously acted survival mystery let down only by its reluctance to answer its own questions. Compulsive, unnerving television.
Two timelines, one wound
The show’s structural gamble is its identity: a stranded-teens survival horror braided with a present-day drama about the middle-aged women those teens became. The cutting between eras is the point — the wilderness never released them, and adulthood is just the crash landing in slow motion. The dual casting, adult actors shadowing their younger counterparts, gives every scene a doubled, haunted charge.
Appetite as metaphor
The cannibalism the marketing promises is, in the show’s hands, less a shock than a symbol — the ultimate expression of what survival costs and what it awakens. Yellowjackets is interested in the group’s slide into ritual and hierarchy, in how ordinary girls construct a cosmology to survive the unbearable. The horror is anthropological as much as visceral.
The ensemble’s ferocity
Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis and their teenage mirrors give performances of real, unglamorous danger — women hollowed and hardened, capable of anything. The ’90s needle-drops and grainy nostalgia are a trap, luring you into warmth before the floor gives way. The acting is the reason the mystery grips even when the plot wanders.
The ambiguity problem
The series flirts with the supernatural without committing, teasing answers it seems reluctant to give, and that coyness can curdle into frustration across a season. Its refusal to resolve is both its unsettling power and its structural weakness.
Verdict
Yellowjackets is a lurid, intelligent nightmare about trauma, hunger and the stories we tell to survive ourselves. Maddening in its evasions, but too well-acted and atmospheric to abandon.