Yellowjackets Review

A high school girls' soccer team from New Jersey crashes in the Canadian wilderness in 1996, and the opening minutes of the pilot make it plain that the survivors did something terrible to stay alive. Yellowjackets tells that story twice: once in the woods, as teammates turn into something closer to a cult, and once twenty-five years later, as the adults discover that someone knows what they did.

The casting is the coup. Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis and Tawny Cypress play grown versions of the girls Sophie Nélisse, Samantha Hanratty, Sophie Thatcher and Jasmin Savoy Brown are creating in parallel, and the rhymes between them are uncanny. Lynskey's suburban mother with a hunter's instincts and Ricci's cheerfully sinister Misty are the pick. The dialogue is barbed and often very funny, and the nineties soundtrack does a great deal of atmospheric work.

The first season is a near-perfect mystery box, and it earned an Emmy nomination for outstanding drama. The second and third open the box and find less inside than promised: the wilderness sequences stay gripping, but the present-day plots stall, the supernatural rules shift to suit the episode, and critics grow impatient with answers that keep receding. A fourth and final season is due in November 2026.