Jenna Coleman's Deliciously Bad 'Wilderness'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 20, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 20, 2023 |

I love a good, stylish, and twisty infidelity-and-murder story, and Blake Lively’s A Simple Favor is probably the best of the genre in recent memory (especially given how the television version of Fatal Attraction fizzled). Jenna Coleman’s Wilderness can’t compete with A Simple Favor, but it at least lives in the same ballpark, even if it is under the dugout. It’s the kind of noir where the darkness is hidden beneath bright lights, great clothes, and Taylor Swift songs.

There’s not a lot of preamble in Prime Video’s six-episode Wilderness: Jenna Coleman and Oliver Jackson-Cohen (The Invisible Man) play the newly married couple Liv and Will Taylor. He’s a big shot who works in a nondescript corporate setting, and she’s a journalist who has given up her career to move from London to NYC to be with him, although not without some warning to maintain her career lest her husband begin sleeping around.

It doesn’t take long for Liv to realize that Will is doing just that. He’s having an affair with a co-worker, Cara (Ashley Benson), and when she finds out, Will says all the things that cheating husbands always say to keep their wives from leaving them, and then he turns right around and cheats on her again. Once Liv moves past heartbreak and into anger, however, she plots her revenge, which initially seems to take a similar shape to Bad Sisters: Liv plots the perfect murder, but it eludes her.

There will be spoilers below, but for those who only want the review portion of this post: Wilderness is fun and trashy, and Coleman plays a scorned and calculating woman exceedingly well. She is both evil and sympathetic, which runs counter to Oliver Jackson-Cohen’s irredeemable character, a role, as I recall, he also played in The Invisible Man. He’s the kind of incredibly handsome guy with piercing blue eyes who is somehow also unattractive, as though you can see into the blackness of his soul. He plays the “I’m so sorry, I will never do it again” card a little too often in Wilderness, and the series probably could’ve been trimmed by an episode or two, but it’s a quick-and-easy binge and an awful delight, if only to watch Coleman curl her lips sinisterly. The supporting cast - Benson as Will’s mistress, Cara; Eric Balfour as Cara’s boyfriend, Garth; and Talia Balsam as Will’s boss — inject additional life into the series, although while Claire Rushbrook — who plays Liv’s mother — serves a functional purpose, the character itself still feels extraneous.

For those who have watched it or do not plan to watch it and want to know the twists — spoilers — the turns are initially unpredictable but less so as the series progresses, although even then, the twists are still plenty of fun. In order to atone for the cheating, Will takes Liv on a road trip, which includes a stop in a beautiful hiking area, where Liv nearly pushes Will off a cliff and to his death.

The two, nevertheless, seem to get along until Will’s mistress, Cara, inexplicably shows up with her boyfriend, Garth. The two couples spend a lot of time together and even vaguely get along until Liv realizes that Will’s relationship with Cara is both more serious than he revealed and ongoing. Angry, Liv runs out into the forest in the middle of the night, spots Cara wearing Will’s raincoat and — thinking it’s Will — pushes Cara to her death.

The police immediately assume that Garth is the killer — it’s always the boyfriend — and Liv, who feels guilty for killing Cara, helps Will cover up the affair so that the police do not turn their attention to him. Will doesn’t know that Liv pushed her, and he grows increasingly desperate to use Liv as his own alibi.

Garth is eventually arrested, but after his release due to lack of evidence, he tracks down Liv and Will in their apartment. He’s pissed because he believes that Liv and Will know more about Cara’s death than they are letting on, including the identity of the man Cara was having an affair with. Garth brings a gun, things get out of hand, and during a scuffle, Liv kills Garth in self-defense.

At this point — and after Liv discovers that Will is still cheating on her — she asks for a divorce. Will refuses and threatens to blackmail her: If she leaves him, he will tell the police that she did not kill Garth in self-defense. She’s trapped.

Thereafter, Liv concocts a plan to give Will enough rope to hang himself. She surreptitiously records him conceding that Liv killed Garth in self-defense, then she leaks a video of Will having sex with Cara. After detectives arrest Will, Liv retracts her alibi defense for Will, and he goes down for a murder that Liv committed, but not before Liv confesses to Will out of earshot of authorities. He knows she did it, and he can’t do a damn thing about it. Liv is free and can continue her affair with Ash (played by Mario’s daughter, Morgana Van Peebles), and Will has to spend the rest of his life in prison basically for sleeping around on his wife.