Yellowjackets review: Gripping and squeamish streaming series

William Golding published Lord of the Flies in 1954 and since then, the trope of the group of unsupervised teens forced to fend for themselves and create their own social strata while stranded in extreme circumstances has perpetuated, especially recently.

In the past two years, Netflix had The Society, a story about high school students trapped in their adultless town while Amazon Prime’s The Wilds follows teen girls deserted on an island as part of a social experiment.

The chilling and gripping Yellowjackets’ core premise centres on a girls’ football team on their way to a national competition when their plane crashes in the remote wilderness. They’re stranded for 19 months before they’re found.

What happens in that intervening time is the stuff of nightmares as formerly timid personalities reveal themselves in the fight for survival, and people are pushed past what they thought were their limits.

Yellowjackets isn’t sparing on the violence either. The series opens with a scene of someone being chased over a cliff onto previously arranged spikes, followed by a shot of the pursuer’s feet next to the now-dead body – a close-up of bright pink Converses.

While the crash itself is depicted in visceral fashion, followed by a Lost-like span of the devastating crash site. Bones jutting out of flesh and crushed limbs are par for the course. It’s not for the squeamish.

And the emotional violence, manipulation and malevolence matches the blood spilt. It’s not just boys who descend into chaos, no gender has a monopoly on brutality.

But what distinguishes Yellowjackets, streaming now on Paramount+, is that there’s a parallel narrative set 25 years later which follows the handful of survivors, a perspective you rarely, if ever, get to explore.

The women are now broken adults, imprisoned in the trauma of their teenage experiences, imprinted by what they saw and felt, but also what they did. The specifics of those acts are slowly revealed, but there are hints, such as Shauna’s (Melanie Lynskey) adeptness at catching, skinning and gutting a rabbit.

Shauna, Taissa (Tawny Cypress), Natalie (Juliette Lewis) and Misty (Christina Ricci) have all received a mysterious postcard with nothing but an ominous reference to the crash – someone is calling them out, and that’s not good news for anyone.

The intercutting between the 1996 and 2021 timelines enhances the jeopardy of both eras while maintaining the series’ general eerie and haunting vibe. Even when the writing can be uneven, Yellowjackets is a great mood piece. Its ghoulish atmosphere, suggesting there may even be something supernatural, is a heavy presence.

While you’d expect Lewis, Ricci, Cypress and Lynskey to be effective as the older counterparts – and they are – the series has done a good job casting the younger versions too, more than capable of anchoring their section of the drama.

Sammi Hanratty as the definitely-a-sociopath Misty is a standout.

By focusing on the fallout as much as it does on the events itself, Yellowjackets weaves a suspenseful, terrifying thriller that is as clenching as it is terrifying.

Yellowjackets is streaming now on Paramount+

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Originally published as Yellowjackets review: Gripping and squeamish streaming series