Wilderness Review: Jenna Coleman Breaks Bad In a Female Revenge Thriller That Doesn’t Go Quite Far Enough

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.

We all support women’s rights. But sometimes it’s a lot more fun to support women’s wrongs. 

That’s the basic gist behind Prime Video thriller Wilderness, which fully leans into television’s recent preoccupation with female revenge stories by giving the wronged wife at its center a chance to get even with her cheating spouse and asking its audience to gleefully come along for the ride.

That’s not how it usually goes in stories like this. You know the drill: a man does a bad, bad thing, and betrays the vows and promises he made to someone he claimed to love, yet it’s the woman who’s generally required to be the bigger person. To forgive and forget. To offer the balm of a fresh start, to swallow the anger and hurt. To make it all okay again. 

Wilderness wants us to wonder what might happen if that story went a different way, if that same woman made a different, angrier, or even more violent choice. Would she be a hero or a villain? Or something in between? 

But despite its admittedly entertaining set-up—and who doesn’t want to watch a largely unrepentant cheating husband get his very deserved comeuppance?—the series struggles to fully commit to its own subversive premise. Wilderness wants to have it both ways: embracing the bold tropes of revenge thrillers while frequently softening and making convenient excuses for its main character’s actions. The end result is something that, while generally fun to watch, just isn’t as good (or shocking) as it could be.

The series follows young married couple Will (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and Liv Taylor (Jenna Coleman), a pair so perfect they look like they’ve basically stepped out of a commercial for household products of some type. Attractive, successful, and moneyed—it’s clear that Liv has married up—it initially seems as though they’ve got it all. The pair have just moved to New York, where Will’s promotion means they’ve been essentially given a giant DUMBO apartment of every young couple’s dreams, complete with high ceilings and great views. 

That this relocation came at the expense of Liv’s sense of self and independence—her visa means she can’t work while she’s in the United States—is barely mentioned and her feelings about it aren’t really explored.  Instead, she seems to throw herself into being the perfect wife: Cooking, decorating, attending swanky company parties as the arm candy at Will’s side. She’s even finally started her novel. Everything’s great. Until it isn’t. 

Because Will sleeps with another woman while he’s away on a work trip. And neither his nor Liv’s lives will ever be the same again.

Liv’s devastated, of course. Will insists it was a one-time thing, a mistake he deeply regrets, a drunken lapse in judgment he’d take back if he could. He seems desperate and genuinely contrite, though one might wonder why he is still getting texts from an alleged one-night stand if it was truly an isolated incident. 

(Narrator voice: It was not an isolated incident.)

Despite her misgivings, Liv agrees to allow Will to try to earn her forgiveness. Part of his peace offering involves finally taking her on her dream vacation—a road trip through the American West that involves hiking, white water rafting, a trip to Las Vegas, and more—in order to give them a chance to reconnect outside of all the pressures of everyday life. 

Unfortunately for both Will and the future of the Taylors’ marriage, Liv discovers (graphic) video evidence that confirms both the ongoing and potentially fairly serious nature of the affair her husband initially tried to brush off. Determined not to become her mother—a woman defined by Liv’s father’s affair, which he left her over—our quote-unquote heroine decides to forgo getting mad in favor of getting even.

What follows is both a weirdly detailed and often hilariously inept series of attempts to use their trip of a lifetime to end Will’s life, as Liv contemplates everything from literally shoving him off a cliff to cutting the safety harness on their rafting gear. Their sudden, strangely convenient run-in with Will’s colleague Cara (Ashley Benson) and her boyfriend Garth (Eric Balfour) on a picturesque hiking trail only makes things worse, because, obviously, Cara’s the woman Will’s been sleeping with, and now Liv’s considering whether her body count needs to go up.

Granted, not all of the show’s plot twists make a ton of sense. Wilderness doesn’t really bother to explain the particulars behind Cara and Will “coincidentally” ending up at the same resort the Taylors are staying at. In fact, it allows Will’s explanation for it to be the only one we hear, even though he is not the most reliable of narrators and his comments offer little context beyond boilerplate “bitches be crazy” sexism.

Pretty Little Liars star Benson is largely wasted in a role that requires her to do little more than look pretty, and her Cara often seems to be an idea more than a three-dimensional person. It’s a shame that a series so focused on a woman’s response to a man’s infidelity deliberately displays so little interest in the only other significant female character on its canvas, but here we are.

Wilderness works when it embraces the most subversive elements of its story, encouraging its audience not just to understand Liv’s position but to sympathize with and root for her to some degree, even though we know her plans are objectively terrible ones.

Coleman, who is largely known for playing an array of plucky, likable heroines in period dramas and genre properties, is clearly having a blast inhabiting a character who goes so against her usual type. She still manages to give Liv some surprisingly human layers, particularly when it comes to her relationship with her mother and the unexpected sympathy she often seems to feel for Cara. (Something I wish the show had explored in greater depth.) 

But the show is undoubtedly its most interesting when we’re allowed to see Liv’s darker, scheming side, as she burns her husband’s clothes, attempts to stalk his mistress, and visualizes the variety of ways she could possibly engineer his death.  Unfortunately, despite the often quite justified rage she feels, the series shies away from allowing Liv to ever go too dark. 

For all that her voiceovers promise shocking deeds, much of Liv’s behavior is reactionary and lacks the true sharp edges or direct intent it’s likely that many viewers were hoping for. I mean, Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” is the show’s literal theme song. Lean into the Reputation vibe, y’all. 

After all, the show goes out of its way to make Will an all-timer of a dirtbag. Not only does he have an affair, but he doesn’t seem all that regretful about it and often behaves as though he actually resents his wife for not getting over his transgression and forgiving him fast enough. Will sucks! He’s basically the epitome of a rich white dude who believes the world is built to work in his favor and has never had to face real consequences for any of his choices. Trust me, no one is going to feel bad for this guy! 

Wilderness is a serviceable enough thriller—it’s got attractive leads, some fun twists, a truly outstanding soundtrack, and the sort of propulsive pace that makes it all too easy to click play on the next episode. But it’s hard not to wonder what might have been, had the show fully committed to some of the darker ideas it flirts with. The end result certainly would have been a more memorable one. 

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Wilderness premieres on Friday, September 15, on Prime Video.

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