Netflix's New Murder Mystery Might Give You a Heart Attack
Netflix's new limited series Untamed doesn't waste much time before giving you a heart attack. Two climbers, grunting and swearing, scale a cliff face, cramming anchors into tiny holds as the wind whistles by. The climber who's leading makes a tiny slip, and your adrenaline spikes. But that's nothing compared with how you feel when a girl's body falls from the top of the cliff and gets caught on the rope tying the two men together, ripping the lead climber off the rock and creating a three-person pendulum, anchored only by the bottom climber. The men, battered onto the rock face by the dramatic swings this new weight causes, scream into the void: “What the fuck?”
Let's rewind. The first episode of Untamed begins with a few seconds of b-roll taken at the gates to Yosemite National Park, where tourists in rows of RVs and SUVs wait for rangers to take their money. That's important to mention, because the best thing about this six-episode show—created by Mark L. Smith, writer of the movie The Revenant and creator of the recently popular Netflix Western American Primeval , along with his daughter Elle Smith—is its setting. It's not just that it's pretty (although the parts of British Columbia that theproduction thing to stand in for Yosemite are certainly stunning). The series has also got its finger pressed on something almost perverse about the contemporary American West in general, and its national parks in particular: People love this land, but their love takes all kinds of odd shapes. Sometimes, it just makes them into annoying, sweaty tourists for a week; sometimes, it has them give up their lives to take seasonal jobs whose main recommendation is proximity to the wild; sometimes, it persuades them to scale cliffs; sometimes, as with the mysterious falling girl whose death will be at the heart of the show's plot, it puts them in danger.
Eric Bana plays a classic humorless and haunted lawman, Kyle Turner, who works for some obscure part of the National Park Service called the Investigative Services Branch. (Ah, to love anything as much as TV writers love to discover new types of law enforcement!) Assigned to look into the falling girl's death and figure out how she ended up with a gnawed-up leg and a gunshot wound before she took her nosedive, Turner gets paired up with Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago), a bright-and-shiny rookie park ranger who's recently moved up from Los Angeles. Paul Souter (Sam Neill, so avuncular as to be almost unrecognizable) is the chief ranger, a longtime friend of Turner's who often covers for him when he flies off the handle. Rosemarie DeWitt is Turner's ex-wife Jill, who's still a presence in his life, due to a shared grievance. And Wilson Bethel is Shane Maguire, a former Army Ranger who disappears into the wild for lengthy periods, nominally to carry out his duties as a park wildlife management officer, but actually because he prefers it. The land brings something out in Maguire, and we're left to wonder whether it's good.
Smith has claimed the American West and certain related themes—violence, lawlessness, found family—as the foundation of his work. While American Primeval succeeded at conveying a worny sense of grim grit in the setting of the 19 th -century Utah War, watching it felt a bit like box-checking. (Yes, of course, the frontier was dirty; yes, of course, everyone died.) Untamed is, in contrast, full of surprises. Multiple characters point out, over the course of the show, that people who visit Yosemite, confined to their vehicles and limited in their time, tend to view only a small percentage of the total acreage. “The rest that's out there... things happen different out there,” Turner says. In his investigation, he will poke into the places where things “happen different,” and we'll get to see a bit of the park's other side.
Turner, of course, rides a horse. He forces Vasquez to ride one too (many jokes about sore butts ensue), and they crisscross the park, following leads. A group of squatters who live in a meadow get drawn into the investigation, and when their elder hippie leader (Marilyn Norry) is interviewed, she's bitingly bitter, an indelible presence in the interrogation room. A white squatter with horrifying dreads introduces himself as “Pakuna” (“It means 'deer jumping down a hill' ”); the officer detaining him responds, “Mine's Milch; means 'I don't give a shit.' ”There are claustrophobic scenes in an old mine shaft, as well as gorgeous moments, like when Vasquez scatters a herd of elk. Other characters include a seasonal worker at the bait shop, Turner's Miwok friend on the park's road crew, and—in flashback—the dead girl's mother, dying of cancer, sitting in their favorite spot, on the edge of a cliff.
Because of these interesting surprises throughout, you could forgive Untamed for being built on a bit of a standard-issue crime plot: The dead person is a 21-year-old troubled blond white girl; the dark history that haunts Turner and his wife involves the violent death of a child. Turner, as a character, “doesn't play by the rules” and lives in a cabin full of unpacked boxes, because of his trauma—all of which is par for the course in crime and Western genres. (Isaac, the character played by Taylor Kitsch in American Primeval , is also good at tracking and shooting, and he too lives out in the bush after losing a child.) Mark L. Smith says that Eric Bana was chosen for the role because he's “good at playing silence”; Elle Smith adds that he also “looks good on a horse.” Those things are both true, but they also mean that Turner, as a character, can still be a little difficulty to access—hypercompetent and honest, rarely light or fun.
Still, when Turner grabs and threatens Maguire in a heated moment, Bana's threatening eyes are magnetic and terrifying. When he discovers the girl's phone, he tries to plug it in and starts swearing and digging through boxes to find the right cord. When he lowers himself off the cliff to see her body, he puts on gloves before touching her, as they both dangle in the air—a singular and telling character detail. Bana and Smith know how to keep you watching, even when parts of the story start to feel familiar. In the summer, we're all tourists. A Yosemite story hits just right.
