I wasn’t expecting Mae Martin to break my brain. The comedian and actor seemed like an unlikely candidate to craft a genre-bending thriller about the troubled teen industry. But “Wayward” isn’t interested in meeting expectations—not mine, not yours, not even its own genre conventions. Over eight episodes, it shape-shifts from mystery to horror to social critique to something I still can’t quite name. And somewhere around episode three, I realized that was the entire point.
The Setup: Two Stories on a Collision Course
“Wayward” wastes no time establishing its dual narratives. In 2003 Toronto, we meet Abbie (Sydney Topliffe) and Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind)—best friends navigating the messy terrain of adolescence. Leila’s still reeling from her sister’s death, self-medicating with recreational drugs and skipping class. Abbie, meanwhile, is suffocating under her controlling parents’ expectations. When their latest misadventure lands them in trouble, a school authority figure named Mr. Turner (Patrick J. Adams, criminally underused) suggests something called Tall Pines Academy—a place that promises to solve “the problem of adolescence” through groundbreaking therapeutic techniques.
That phrase stuck with me. The problem of adolescence. As if being a teenager is something that needs fixing.
Meanwhile, across the border in Vermont, Alex Dempsey (Martin) and his pregnant partner Laura (Sarah Gadon) are settling into the town of Tall Pines. Alex just lost his job as a Detroit cop following an excessive force scandal, but somehow, miraculously, the local police department doesn’t care. They don’t even blink at the fact that Alex is a trans man receiving hormone therapy. Everything in Tall Pines seems too perfect—the quintessential New England Main Street, the sprawling farmhouse they’re getting rent-free (courtesy of Laura’s old mentor), the warm welcome from everyone they meet.
Laura is a Tall Pines Academy graduate herself, and she credits the school’s enigmatic founder, Evelyn Wade (Toni Collette), with turning her life around. But as Alex starts his new job with the local police department, cracks begin to show in this pastoral paradise.
The Town That’s Just Slightly… Off
Here’s what makes “Wayward” so disorienting: it never quite settles into a single genre. Is it a mystery? A horror show? A dark satire of the troubled teen industry? Science fiction? All of the above? The answer keeps shifting beneath your feet like quicksand.
Director Euros Lyn (along with Renuka Jeyapalan and John Fawcett, who directed additional episodes) crafts an almost languid pace that simultaneously lulls you into false security and sets your nerves on edge. The sound design is particularly brilliant—natural noises feel intrusive and alien, making you question whether what you’re seeing is reality or hallucination. There’s a dreamlike quality to the whole thing, very Canadian in its atmospheric restraint, very David Lynch in its underlying wrongness.
Twin Peaks comparisons are inevitable, and honestly, they’re fair. But “Wayward” isn’t trying to be Twin Peaks. It’s doing something more slippery, more elusive. Where Lynch eventually reveals his mysteries (sort of), Martin seems less interested in concrete answers than in the uncomfortable questions themselves.
Evelyn Wade and the Cult of Certainty
Toni Collette’s Evelyn Wade is the dark heart of “Wayward,” and she’s absolutely mesmerizing. Playing the founder of Tall Pines Academy as part guru, part cult leader, with shades of Charles Manson and a dash of Nicole Kidman’s character from “Nine Perfect Strangers,” Collette makes Evelyn simultaneously charismatic and repellent.
Evelyn’s philosophy, laid out in what the show unconvincingly presents as a bestselling book, revolves around epigenetic trauma—the idea that kids are victims of psychoses passed down through generations. As she puts it in one chilling monologue: “You must understand that the darkness in you is not your fault. You’re just a ripple of all that came before. You never stood a chance. Birth is nonconsensual.”
That last line haunted me. It’s nihilistic and oddly liberating at the same time, absolving kids of responsibility while stripping them of agency. And that’s the trap—Evelyn’s program claims to heal, but what we see feels more like indoctrination, control masked as care.
The academy’s methods are deliberately murky. We get glimpses of strange therapeutic techniques, rigid hierarchies, cult-like devotion from graduates, and something darker lurking beneath the surface. The show walks a fascinating line here—it never fully commits to exposing the specifics of Tall Pines’ methodology, leaving us uncertain whether the critique is aimed at this particular program or the entire troubled teen industry itself.
A Trans Protagonist in a Transitional Story
One of “Wayward’s” most interesting layers is its portrayal of Alex as a trans man. Martin, who is nonbinary and has spoken about how playing Alex allowed them to explore trans identity and hypermasculinity in new depth, brings a naturalistic quality to the role that grounds the show’s stranger elements.
Alex is dealing with his own transitions—professional (from Detroit cop to small-town police officer), personal (becoming a father), and physical (continuing hormone therapy). His character exists in liminal spaces, much like the show itself. He’s both a proactive investigator trying to uncover Tall Pines’ secrets and a reactive figure being slowly gaslit by the community around him, echoing Mia Farrow’s paranoid isolation in “Rosemary’s Baby.”
Martin’s naturally dry affect works perfectly here, creating a still point at the center of the show’s swirling weirdness. Alex’s anger issues simmer but never quite boil over, his suspicions mount but can’t find solid ground. It’s a performance built on restraint, on things left unsaid.
The relationship between Alex and Laura (played with almost ethereal luminosity by Sarah Gadon) is genuinely sweet, which makes its gradual unraveling all the more unsettling. You keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something to go horribly wrong, and that anticipation becomes its own form of dread.
The Kids Are (Maybe?) Alright
While Martin and Collette anchor the show with their star power, the real standouts are the younger cast members. Sydney Topliffe and Alyvia Alyn Lind (sister to prolific young actresses Emily and Natalie) bring genuine vulnerability and believable discomfort to Abbie and Leila. Their friendship feels lived-in and authentic, which makes their eventual entrapment at Tall Pines Academy genuinely distressing.
There’s also Isolde Ardies, whose performance as Stacey—a sad-eyed, terrifyingly intense rule-follower—is a real highlight. She embodies the academy’s most successful and most disturbing outcome: a teenager so thoroughly indoctrinated that she’s become an instrument of the system.
These performances matter because “Wayward” is fundamentally about the ways adults fail children. It’s about how institutions claim to help troubled teens while actually exploiting their vulnerability. If the show has a clear message, it’s this: there are no bad kids, only kids—and kids shouldn’t be locked up in weird academies.
But even that message gets complicated. Because what exactly is happening at Tall Pines Academy? What are those strange lights the kids see? Why do graduates seem both traumatized and devoted? The show never fully commits to an answer.
The Frustration and the Beauty of Ambiguity
I’m going to be honest: “Wayward” doesn’t really end so much as stop. After eight episodes of building atmosphere and raising questions, it reaches something closer to “an end” than the end. Major plot threads remain unresolved. The nature of what’s happening at Tall Pines stays tantalizingly vague. Characters make choices that feel more thematic than logical.
And here’s the thing—I wasn’t frustrated by this. At least, not entirely.
There’s something almost refreshing about a show that refuses to neatly package its themes into a bow-tied conclusion. “Wayward” is a pupal show, as one critic noted—a show about transformation that itself remains in transformation. If you’re looking for a butterfly to emerge, you’ll be disappointed. But if you can sit with the chrysalis stage, with the uncomfortable in-between spaces, there’s something valuable here.
The show constantly feels on the brink of shifting into a different genre. After two or three episodes, I genuinely couldn’t tell if it was going to become full-on horror, science fiction, or dark satire. It teases so many directions—cult thriller, demonic possession story, institutional exposé, generational trauma study—without fully committing to any single path.
Critics have been divided. Rotten Tomatoes shows a 78% approval rating, but audience scores on IMDb hover around 5.9. The Hollywood Reporter praised its ambition while acknowledging it never reaches its “fully realized potential.” Arab News highlighted Collette’s “compelling, charismatic and repellent” performance as saving the show from mediocrity. Roger Ebert’s site was more blunt: “‘Wayward’ goes nowhere. And really, it could have gone somewhere.”
A Personal Project Years in the Making
What makes “Wayward” even more intriguing is understanding its origins. Mae Martin has said this is a story they’ve been “dying to tell for years.” The show was originally titled “Tall Pines” when it was commissioned by Netflix in April 2023, and Martin moved to Los Angeles specifically to work on it.
The troubled teen industry is a real, documented problem—private facilities that promise to reform difficult adolescents through therapeutic techniques that often amount to abuse, isolation, and psychological manipulation. Paris Hilton has spoken about her experiences. There are countless survivor stories. The industry is largely unregulated, profit-driven, and deeply problematic.
Martin clearly has things to say about this, but “Wayward” approaches the subject slant, through atmosphere and suggestion rather than direct critique. It’s filmed in Ontario but set in Vermont, giving it a slightly displaced quality—neither fully American nor Canadian, existing in its own slightly off-kilter reality.
The production brought together talent from across borders: London and Los Angeles-based Objective Fiction partnered with Canada’s Sphere Media. The cast includes Canadian, British, Australian, and American actors. It’s a truly international production, which might explain some of its genre-fluid, hard-to-categorize quality.
What I’ll Remember
“Wayward” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival before its Netflix release on September 25, 2025. All eight episodes dropped at once, and I binged them over two evenings, feeling increasingly unmoored as the story progressed.
What will stay with me isn’t the plot—honestly, the specifics are already getting fuzzy, which might be the point. What lingers is the mood, the atmosphere of wrongness hiding beneath small-town politeness. It’s Collette’s unsettling smile. It’s the teenagers’ growing horror as they realize they can’t escape. It’s the sound design making a forest at night feel alien and threatening. It’s Martin’s quiet, simmering performance as someone who knows something is wrong but can’t quite articulate what.
It’s also the show’s central question, which it never really answers: What do we do with troubled teens? How do we help young people navigating trauma, depression, anger, and pain without resorting to institutions that might cause more harm? “Wayward” doesn’t pretend to have solutions. It just makes you deeply uncomfortable with the ones we’ve created.
Is “Wayward” successful? That depends on what you want from it. If you’re looking for a tight thriller with a satisfying conclusion, look elsewhere. If you want clear heroes and villains, this isn’t it. But if you’re willing to sit with ambiguity, with questions that don’t have easy answers, with a show that’s more interested in capturing a feeling than explaining a plot, then “Wayward” offers something genuinely unusual.
Martin is an incredibly talented creator, and this series proves their voice can stretch far beyond comedy. “Wayward” is messy, frustrating, evasive, and haunting—which might be exactly what it needs to be. Sometimes the scariest stories are the ones that refuse to resolve, that leave you suspended in uncertainty.
I’m still thinking about those kids in Tall Pines Academy, about Evelyn Wade’s dead-eyed certainty, about Alex trying to protect his growing family from something he can’t quite see. The show got under my skin in ways I’m still processing.
And maybe that’s the highest compliment I can give it. In an era of overly explained, neatly tied-up streaming content, “Wayward” dares to leave you unsettled. It dares to not have all the answers. It dares to be difficult.
Whether that makes it brilliant or flawed probably depends on who you ask. For me, it makes it memorable. And in today’s oversaturated streaming landscape, that’s rarer than you might think.
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