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Wilderness -- a review

I was a huge fan of Jenna Coleman when she played Clara Osborn, the companion to the eleventh and twelfth Doctor Who (played by Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi, respectively). Doctor Who, a sort of mad magician who literally travels through space and time, can be an intimidating character, but Coleman more than held her own, plying an engaging performance that was self-assured without being too arrogant. Her time on the program, stretched across the better episodes of two of the Doctors, was extremely memorable for me.

So when I heard that Coleman was starring in Wilderness, a mini-series for the Amazon Prime streaming service, I was more than happy to give it a shot. Of course, I waited until all of the episodes were up. I hate the trend with some streamers reverting to the old ’one episode per week’ tactic; I’d rather binge-watch the whole thing over a day or two, which was easy to do with Wilderness, seeing how it only had six episodes, overall. But the first episode was slow going, and it felt so much like a bad soap opera that I had considered quitting, but I stuck with it. And I'm glad that I did.

Coleman plays Olivia (“Call me Liv”) Taylor, a British woman who happily moves to New York City when her husband Will (Oliver Jackson Cohen) gets a job on the staff of a major hotel. While Olivia gave up her journalist job in England to basically be a housewife, she feels she’ll be able to use the free time she has to write a novel. But on Christmas Eve, just after Will comes home, Olivia discovers that he had been having an affair with another woman at work.

After undergoing the expected turbulence that such a revelation would bring to a marriage, Olivia agrees to stick it out with Will by going on an extended vacation with him across the United States. But Olivia, who also narrates this tale, makes it clear that she still very much despises Will--who is revealed to have had affairs with at least two women, and has promised one of them (caught on video) that he shall leave Olivia. For her part, Olivia plans to use this trip to kill her cheating husband in an “accident.” All she needs is the right place and the right time.

Once it reaches this black-hearted stage, Wilderness stops being a dopey soap opera and almost soars to Hitchcockian heights. Almost. While it’s a very well done and suspenseful crime drama (based on the novel by B. E. Jones), it still can’t quite shake its soapy flourishes. But I found myself rooting for Olivia throughout this saga. Coleman manages to make her character’s descent into murder gripping to watch without completely dehumanizing her, and the twists and turns are captivating without making things too silly. Wilderness wound up being an entertaining and engrossing thriller that kept me on the edge of my seat till the end. --SF

Wilderness is available only on the Amazon Prime streaming service.

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