The Wilds S02 HDR 2160p AMZN WEB H265-SCENE
A group of teenage girls from radically different backgrounds find themselves stranded on a remote island, unaware that they have just become the subjects of an elaborate social experiment.
Genre: Drama, Thriller, Mystery
Stars: Mia Healey, Helena Howard, Reign Edwards, Shannon Berry
The Wilds review - Lost meets Mean Girls in Amazon's teen thriller
A party of schoolgirls wash up on a deserted island with a seemingly dangerous side, in a series that marries coming-of-age drama with apocalyptic mystery
@LucyMangan
Fri 11 Dec 2020 13.00 GMT
It's Lost for teens. It's Lord of the Flies with girls. It's the Breakfast Club with an apocalyptic twist. It's Mean Girls meets Pretty Little Liars meets The Society meets all those post-Twilight, sub-Buffy, Gen Z vampire programmes you never quite caught the names of, but without - so far - the vampires. It's Amazon Prime's first YA-offering-not-based-on-an-existing-intellectual-property, it's a 10-part series called The Wilds and resistance is futile.
Though, in all fairness, it may not feel like that immediately. When we first meet the group of more or less disaffected 17-year-olds as they pile on to a chartered plane headed for an all-female retreat in Hawaii (named, for foreshadowing fans, The Dawn of Eve), well, my goodness - DON'T they just seem the most charmless group of mardy babies you could ever hope to meet. Foremost among them is bookish Leah (Sarah Pidgeon), who has just broken up with her boyfriend and says things to her parents like: "e;Please don't refer to my emotional devastation as 'a funk'."e; Then there is Rachel (Reign Edwards), sulking aggressively about something and pulling her sister Nora (Helena Howard) down with her, bellicose Dot (Shannon Berry), permanently furious class-and-every-other-kind-of-warrior Toni (Erana James) and her timid friend Martha (Jenna Clause), and smug hot girl Fatin (Sophia Ali). Lightening the mood of the show, if not the passengers on the plane to Hawaii, are pathologically peppy Texan Shelby (Mia Healey) and overenthusiastic chatterbox Jeanette (Chi Nguyen).
The plane scenes, however, are a flashback. In the present, Leah - and in subsequent episodes each surviving girl in turn - is being questioned by an investigator and a psychologist about how they survived. The plane, you see, crashed suddenly and the girls washed up on an island together with no memory of how they got there, but an unexplained and sudden working knowledge of how to perform CPR when a semi-drowned peer requires it. From thereon the narrative grappling hooks start to sink in and - despite the occasional plot-wobble over the next nine hours - never really stop.
The girls' intertwined stories on the island unfold as they explain their lives before, during and after to the investigators. The theme of The Wilds is signalled almost painfully obviously (even allowing for the fact that it is aimed at a younger demographic) at the start. "e;There was trauma,"e; agrees Leah early on when the therapist asks her about life awaiting rescue on the island. "e;But being a teenage girl in normalised America? That was the real living hell."e; But once that point has been loudly made, it is on with the story proper, which rapidly both deepens and widens to deliver a view of today's young, female life experience that grows to be panoramic, detailed, daft and moving all at once.
Leah's boyfriend turns out to be an older man, who thought she was 18 when he took her virginity - then took off when he found out she was not. Dot was her high school's oxy dealer - selling her terminally ill father's basic medication to buy the better stuff he needed that they otherwise couldn't afford, and caring for him up until - and including - the very moment he died. Rachel's backstory is fleshed out in the second episode and we see how bitter disappointment and an identity crisis are playing into her island life and her treatment of Nora. The relationships among all the survivors evolve organically and credibly, as they struggle not just with their situation - even as they lean increasingly into its freedoms - but their sexualities, insecurities, jealousies and the assorted legacies of their experiences back in the real world. Although the writer doesn't quite capture the power and zest of authentic teenage - especially female - speech, it at least doesn't have them communicating in overscripted zingers either. An almost unimpeachable array of performances sell it well, and overall you buy it.
In the wings, a mystery is waiting. The organiser of the retreat is a woman called Gretchen (Rachel Griffiths), who watches the girls intently on a wall of monitors as they go about their business. She speaks of secret operatives among them and it seems that the girls could be the hapless victims of an obscene social-scientific experiment. Or something else and something worse. We don't yet know, but my bet would be you'll stay till the end to find out. If nothing else, as with Leah, it will pull you right out of any funk you're in.
General
Complete name: the.wilds.s02e01.hdr.2160p.web.h265-glhf.mkv
Format : Matroska
Duration : 56 min 33 s
Video
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec: Bit rate : 13.9 Mb/s
Width : 3 840 pixels
Height : 2 160 pixels
Frame rate : 23.976 (24000/1001) FPS
Audio
Format/Info : Enhanced Audio Coding 3
Bit rate : 640 kb/s
Channel(s) : 6 channels
Language : English
Subtitles : English, English [SDH], Arabic, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, European Spanish, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek (Modern), Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin American Spanish, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese Brazilian, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish
Screens
