Wayward review: Toni Collette is amazing(ly creepy) in Netflix dark thriller

When Toni Collette is playing someone good, she’s very very good. When she’s playing someone bad, she’s amazing.

In new Netflix series Wayward she’s Evelyn Wade, who we first see on a well-worn videotape (it’s 2003) spruiking the benefits of Tall Pines Academy, a boarding school for teens who’ve gone off the rails … according to the concerned adults around them at least. She promises to deploy ‘groundbreaking therapeutic techniques’ to ‘solve the problem of adolescence’. Wow, that doesn’t sound sinister at all.

Wayward: creepy opening

We already know Tall Pines is the kind of place the students are desperate to get out of, thanks to a creepy opening scene involving a nighttime escape attempt while Wade’s recorded voice blares over loudspeakers saying unsettling things like ‘you’re lying on your back calling out for your mother’.

So when Toronto highschooler Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind) is shown the videotape by her guidance councillor and told ‘this train has already left the station’, we know she’s in trouble even before we see a creepy van following her around.

But at least she’s got her glued-at-the-hip bestie Abbie (Sydney Topliffe) she can rely on. Lelia’s been through some rough times (a dead sister is just the start), while Abbie seems to have a bit more promise going by the way all the grown-ups not-so-subtly suggest that Lelia’s holding her back.

In a case of one in, all in, they both end up sent to Tall Pines, where their friendship will hopefully not come under constant attack from Wade’s efforts at re-education.

Wayward: tour guides

That’s our window on the world inside the Academy. Outside, our tour guides are Alex (Mae Martin, the Canadian actor, writer and comedian who created Wayward) and pregnant wife Laura (Sarah Gadon), who are back in the town of Tall Pines looking for a fresh start after things in Detroit didn’t work out as they’d planned.

Alex is a cop who’s joining the local police force, while Laura has a strong connection to the local community thanks to being a graduate of Tall Pines Academy. She seems to have come out of the experience on top; the house they’re moving into with no strings attached belongs to Evelyn, which is not at all suspicious behaviour.

Alex soon discovers that the townsfolk are already across pretty much everything about their situation. To make matters more unsettling, his first day on the job involves dealing with a terrified and bloody runaway teen, an event that doesn’t seem to faze anyone else on the force. In fact, not much in Tall Pines seems to faze anyone living there, which is usually a pretty big sign that not only is something bad going on but everyone is already in on it.

Wayward: the town

Too out-there to be realistic but not out-there enough to be a compelling setting in its own right, the town is one of the weaker elements in Wayward. Fortunately, most of the focus is elsewhere, as Alex gets dragged into the current mystery of what’s going on at the Academy now while also trying to figure out happened with Laura in the past.

The Lelia and Abbie plot is initially the more interesting of the two, mostly because Evelyn’s Academy rapidly reveals itself to be extremely committed to the kind of tough love usually only handed out in prisons run by repressive regimes.

Grim uniforms, insulting nicknames, strict rules against touching – well, unless you’re a guard, then you can get as handsy as you like – and a system that encourages ratting out your fellow students for the smallest of infractions are all part of Evelyn’s method of correcting her students.

There’s not a lot here that’s all that new, and the actual mystery side of things is mostly about wanting to see how the characters will react to revelations we’ve already figured out. The point is more about the ways organisations like the Academy mistreat and manipulate people into going along – and eventually, see the abuse as a positive thing.

So this hinges more on the characters than the plot, and that’s where this stands tall. Alex is reserved and a bit awkward: at first it’s being a trans man (Martin is non-binary) that has him wary around the locals, but pretty quickly he figures out that whatever’s going on goes way beyond a few clumsy conversations.

Inside the Academy, Lind and Topliffe make Lelia and Abbie’s almost smothering teenage friendship totally convincing. The series as a whole is great with the teen characters, and the other inmates at the Academy are both vivid and believable. Which makes their plight all the more concerning, because Evelyn isn’t playing around.

With long hair and a vaguely hippie vibe, her deal initially seems to be of the ‘cruel to be kind’ variety, someone who really does want to help children – only her methods seem to focus a little too much on breaking kids down rather than building them up.

There’s enough quirky edge to her brutal sadism to make her more than just your usual sinister menace, and Collette projects a convincing authority and assurance even when things start to get a little unhinged.

In a series that sometimes seems more focused on getting the viewer to ponder the subtext than be swept along by the storytelling, Collette’s performance grounds the message in something real.

Sometimes evil ideas have a face. And a fondness for daggy necklaces.

Wayward premieres on Netflix from 25 September 2025.

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