Yellowjackets review – gory Lord of Flies series gets lost in the wilderness

The brash new thriller, starring Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis and Melanie Lynskey, is an ambitious meditation on survival and middle age with turbulent tonal shifts

It’s clear from the first scene of Yellowjackets, Showtime’s genre-bending survivalist series with a host of second-act 90s stars, that the girls of Wiskayok high school, fierce soccer stars on the field and headstrong teens off it, will go feral. There’s blood in the snow, screams of terror, a booby trap, an impaled body (not the first in a series that favors at least three gory shots an episode), a heart necklace hanging from a lifeless body, figures garbed in animal skins and overt suggestions of cannibalism.

Cut to weeks earlier, 1996: the Yellowjackets, an undefeated and under-heralded soccer team in suburban New Jersey, are headed to nationals, and their close-knit relationships are starting to fray. Then cut to 2021, when four of the girls, now fortysomethings concealing improbable trauma with cracking glue, are thrown back to the tabloid-heavy drama of their past. The 10-part series, created by the Narcos alums Bart Nickerson and Ashley Lyle, toggles between the (pandemic-less) present and the girls’ traumatic upheaval 25 years before, when the private plane to nationals crashes somewhere in the Canadian wilderness. Lord of the Flies, meet Liz Phair and Lost.

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source https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/nov/12/yellowjackets-review-gory-lord-of-flies-series-gets-lost-in-the-wilderness

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