‘Yellowjackets’: horror and drama with great actresses in front

If you felt that what suffered by the group of ‘Lost’, or the young women of ‘The wilds’, was an ordeal, wait to see the drift of the women’s youth soccer team of ‘Yellowjackets’ (Movistar +, since Monday, the 15th) after also suffering a plane crash and falling in the middle of nowhere. Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson (writer-producers of the ‘Narcos’ saga) dare to go where William Golding, in reality, did not go with ‘Lord of the Flies’.

In the fantastic first episode of the series, the director Karyn Kusama it captures adolescent angst (female, specifically) as well as it did in the growing cult film ‘Jennifer’s body’. In conversation with this newspaper, the actress Ella Purnell (Which, okay, we accept as a high school student even though he’s 25 years old) highlights Kusama’s interest in psychological precision: “The series has a huge cast, just huge, but she understood each character to the millimeter, in addition to the relationships particular and intricate of each with all the others. “

A choral recital

We’re talking about a huge cast, just huge, in more ways than one: Purnell (like rich girl Jackie, sort of team leader) is joined by promises Sophie nelisse (introspectiva Shauna), Sophie Thatcher (rocker Natalie), Samantha Hanratty (outcast Misty) and Yasmin Savoy Brown (balanced Taissa), who play the four survivors we know, twenty-five years later, embodied by Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci and Tawny Cypress: almost nothing.

As it takes place in the 1990s, ‘Yellowjackets’ is a gruesome and tense exercise in survival horror. When he jumps into the present, hormonal frenzy gives way to adult disappointment and the series turns into a suspense drama with hints of dark humor. The four former companions have moved on with their lives, in part because they have learned to compartmentalize memories and have not spoken to each other for years. Shauna leads an unhappy life as a housewife: her husband often (mysteriously) comes home late from work and her daughter makes no effort to communicate with her. Again, it has touched Lynskey, as in ‘Togetherness’, the role of a woman sunk in a marriage without spark. “It’s a bit, it’s true, a return to that series, only with some added elements,” he says and smiles. “I think I end up in these kinds of sad wife roles because of my age and my close person appearance. But I have no problems with it. In fact, in this series I find everyday scenes as intriguing as those with persecution and mystery. Daily life is also an enigma“.

Friendship born of trauma

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Without going into excessive ‘spoilers’, we will say that, in 2021, someone has decided to settle accounts and the survivors try to find out who is harassing them. The most dedicated is Misty, an amateur detective when not working as a disturbing nurse. “Misty,” Christina Ricci tells us about her character, “has the personality of a squeezed girl. Take a rejected and antisocial person and apply twenty years of constant contempt. What can come out of something like this? A passive-aggressive person, who has learned to profit from his alleged weakness“A much more powerful image projects Taissa (Tawny Cypress), an aspiring state senator (” the Kamala Harris ‘queer’, “they call her) whose son has started receiving visits from a mysterious woman.

For her part, Juliette Lewis (as Ricci, a nineties Hollywood icon) brings out her rockier side in her portrayal of Natalie, who indulged in drugs, drinking and sex after her survival adventure. When we meet her, she seems to be on a better path, “but you quickly discover that she is still there,” Lewis explains. “Delivered to self-destruction and now revenge too. It was interesting to dive into all of that. I like the series because it talks about a friendship resulting not from happy moments, but above all from the bonds created by a traumatic experience“It sounds like (and is) raw series, but ‘Yellowjackets’ is also exhilarating and addictive: who knows if a surprise hit this final stretch of the year.