Wayward Review | Mae Martin’s Delightful Perversion Of Maternal Care Crumbles Under A Mediocre Climax

Wayward, Mae Martin’s recently released limited series, prepares us for unruliness right from its title. Such a deliciously far-reaching term to explore the constituents of friendship, sexuality, identity, motherhood, and adolescence would raise any spectator’s hopes. In the first couple of episodes, Wayward introduces us to Tall Pines, a fictional town in Vermont, where Tall Pines Academy, a school-cum-institution, is run by Evelyn Wade (Toni Colette). While her big spectacles and driving around the neighbourhood in a tricycle might appear quirky, her presence on screen is profoundly eerie and threatening.

We follow Leila (Alyvia Lind) and Abby (Sydney Topliffe), two best friends from Toronto, who find themselves under the creepy care of Evelyn by a twist of fate. Set in 2003, the narrative also tracks Laura (Sarah Gadon) and Alex (Martin), a couple from Detroit who move to Tall Pines under desperate circumstances. They have little money; Laura is pregnant, and Alex is a trans cop with temper issues. Acquiring a rent-free house for inhabitation courtesy of Evelyn, who once taught Laura, they settle in Tall Pines. Alex begins his job at the police department, only to observe strange patterns of missing teens from the Academy.

Our inside view is supplied by the new recruits, Abby and Leila, who begin to hatch an escape plan the moment they enter this prison school. They instinctively grasp the terror of ritualism practised by the authorities on the resident populace of troubled adolescents. The Academy prohibits touching, encourages betrayal among students, and sorts them into a brutal hierarchy, at the end of which lies a strange memory-erasing ceremony called the “Leap.” Episode 5, titled “Build”, featuring a student uprising led by Leila, is wonderfully imagined, harking back to Jack Nicholson’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The protest abruptly dissolves when a student (Ello) collapses due to a drug overdose. This turning point appears forceful and without context, and from here on, the remaining three episodes are largely forgettable.

In these last few episodes, Leila’s arc is particularly uninspiring and Evelyn’s spooky charm on her is dull in comparison to what the show builds the headmistress to be. By decentering the pair of teens to explore the personal histories of Evelyn and Laura, Wayward reframes and reorients an otherwise invested spectator. Young Evelyn’s ascent to power is marked by the brutal killing of the leader of the cult she joins. Her designed method for treating the underlying trauma that distresses the cohort of youngsters under her supervision is through anesthetising memory and replacing that lacuna with each individual’s unique capacity for violence. Through this process, she attempts to birth a new generation of people who are beyond guilt, beyond restriction. Concurrently, she inculcates in them a systematic obedience to her. Some stay loyal, others come out of her shadow.

This eight-episode series delicately upends our notion of maternal care. Since the Academy ritually severs all forms of attachment—a ham-handed metaphor for the cutting of the umbilical cord—the life of those who graduate and settle in the town is bereft of ordinary care, conventional ethics, and general warmth. Evelyn’s desire to build a community, a collective, results in a peculiar state of sustained Bakhtinian carnivalesque, where at the core of subversion lies the act of murder. Killing, then, becomes a rite of passage that fosters a sense of affinity among individuals.

In Laura, we find our challenge to Evelyn, who registers no sense of affection for her soon-to-be-born child. Consider the scene where she assumes the sound of a croaking toad emanating from her womb. This spontaneous aural link establishes not only her growing sense of discomfort with the unborn child, but also what is to follow. She goes on to hold the toad captive, now a stand-in for the baby, and mechanically shreds it by throwing it in the kitchen sink grinder. Blood collects and oozes out of the hole in the washbasin. Drops of blood spatter and combine with relief on her face. This singular act of Laura enfolds waste, toad, baby, and blood in the kitchen and strangulates the most domestic of places in a house with murder. 

The disavowal of heteronormative structures, a repeated effectuation of our gnarly aberrant inclinations, and the abandonment of the possibility of goodness in human existence come together inventively in the idea of perverse motherhood in Wayward. This is a treacherously wicked slope that the show treads on with flamboyance, for all unruly maternalistic relationships (consider also Rabbit and Stacey) have zero pathological undertone. Stripping the notion that such maternally violent acts are rare, Mae Martin infuses ambiguity and roguery in the process of mothering.

But the climax, with its shoddy writing and incomplete characterisation, makes the above reading more generous and obscures the dissatisfaction by the end of Wayward.