‘Wayward’ on Netflix: What you should know about the creepy series that excited TIFF

Out today on Netflix, Wayward is being hyped as a companion to the best of the most enthrallingly unsettling stories previously backed by the streamer.

Nevermind which of the bleak and the grim of such stories your mind went straight to just now, the popular consensus seems to be in favour of the Emmy winning Adolescence.

The Hollywood Reporter shared in their review of the tense drama that just as its predecessor “offered no particular solution” to the crisis of youth depicted in it, the same “discomfort” continues in Netflix’s latest release, which “posits that the industrial complex built around ‘fixing’ troubled kids, of all genders, might be even more broken than the kids themselves.”

Premise

While Wayward is starkly comedic, it is not a comedy in the slightest — the series, comprising eight episodes, reflects its creator Mae Martin’s dry wit and aims to unsettle audiences with absurd realities borrowed from the real world.

The programme’s description on Netflix’s official website reads, “A small-town cop suspects that the local school for troubled teens — and its dangerously charismatic founder — may not be all it seems.”

Principal Cast

Series creator and non-binary artist Mae Martin leads the show, while Sarah Gadon joins them in the role of their wife.

Toni Collette rounds out the cast as the enigmatic, perhaps sinister, head of the Tall Pines Academy — a youth correctional facility situated in the show’s fictional town of the same name.

TIFF outing

Wayward initially premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and garnered largely positive attention, before making its way into Netflix’s catalogue.

While preparing to present the series at TIFF, Martin told The Wrap, “I wanted to explore how young people know who they are and they have a strong moral compass, and then we all, as we get older, have to suppress our critical thinking to participate in the world. So I wanted to make a thriller out of that and explore the troubled teen industry.”