Amazon Prime Video’s ‘Wilderness’ Delivers an Entertainingly Lurid Adaptation of B.E. Jones’ Novel
The opening scene of Wilderness’ first episode is not exactly subtle: As British married couple Liv (Jenna Coleman) and Will (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) drive a Mustang down the open highway of the American southwest and Liv delivers portentous narration about the dangers that vulnerable women face from men, the car runs over a black widow spider, squashing it flat. The rest of the six-episode Amazon Prime Video series has a bit more finesse, but creator Marnie Dickens leans into the soapiness of the story, adapted from the 2019 novel by B.E. Jones.
The obvious comparison point for Wilderness is Gone Girl, especially in Liv’s confident scheming and her sardonic, sometimes slightly bitter narration. But Liv isn’t nearly as calculating as Amy Dunne, and she genuinely loves Will, at least at first. She’s not a sociopath, just a woman who’s been hurt too many times. Finding out that her seemingly perfect husband of less than a year has been regularly cheating on her is too much for her to handle.
Instead of immediately confronting Will with everything she knows, Liv accepts his lie about a one-time slip-up and agrees to his suggestion that they take the road trip they’ve always talked about, as a way to reconnect. As they explore the beauty of America’s national parks, Liv seethes with resentment, waiting for a moment when she can fully forgive Will — or lead him to his death in the treacherous wilderness. Things become even more complicated when Will’s co-worker and mistress Cara (Ashley Benson) shows up at the couple’s hotel, claiming to be on a coincidental vacation with her boyfriend Garth (Eric Balfour).
Liv commits a terrible act while on that trip, and she has to deal with the consequences after returning to New York City, where she and Will recently moved for his job with an upscale hotel company. Although the plot jumps around in time occasionally in the initial episodes, Wilderness isn’t a mystery series, and there’s no question about whether Will is actually cheating or about who is responsible for the violent acts that occur in later episodes. If there’s any mystery in Wilderness, it’s the inscrutability of Liv’s mental state, which shifts from anger to vengeance to remorse to self-pity, as she reacts to each new development in her suddenly chaotic life.
Coleman holds that together with a mesmerizing performance, even when the character can get a little frustrating to watch. Wilderness is built on the dynamic between two clearly dysfunctional and toxic but also highly charismatic people, and they sometimes seem like they are perfectly suited for each other in their terribleness, just like Amy and Nick Dunne. As frantic as Liv can get while trying to keep herself together, she’s always one step ahead of the cluelessly narcissistic Will. Jackson-Cohen plays Will with the right balance of smarm and smolder, and it’s easy to root for his comeuppance, no matter how exaggerated it is.
Dickens and director So Yong Kim, who helms all six episodes, could have dialed up that exaggeration a bit, giving Wilderness more of a pulpy edge to go with the lurid twists in the plot. The show’s biggest challenge is the tension between prestige-TV respectability and trashy thriller excess, which is never quite resolved. The more unhinged the story and performances get, the more entertaining Wilderness becomes. Liv doesn’t bother with subtlety, and the show doesn’t need it, either.
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Josh Bell is a freelance writer and movie/TV critic based in Las Vegas. He’s the former film editor of Las Vegas Weekly and the former TV comedies guide for About.com. He has written about movies, TV, and pop culture for Vulture, Polygon, CBR, Inverse, Crooked Marquee, and more. With comedian Jason Harris, he co-hosts the podcast Awesome Movie Year.