note: all star ratings have to do with whether I think the story told is a realistic portrayal. In fact, all reviews are about covering issues related to abuse, scapegoating, toxic family portrayal, alcoholic family portrayal, substance abuse family portrayal, children from abusive families and their experiences, and how effective that portrayal is, not about how effective the movie-making is, or the set design, or production, directing and acting. I leave those concerns to other writers and reviewers. I don't even cover whether I would recommend the movie to others based on my likes and dislikes; I only recommend movies that I think will open people's eyes as to how survivors of abuse live in the world.
Wilderness
... Liv and Will Taylor are a young British couple whose marriage is threatened when Liv sees a message on Will's mobile phone revealing his affair with a co-worker. Heartbreak quickly turns into fury and revenge.
It is created by Marnie Dickens from the 2017 novel Wilderness by B.E. Jones, directed by So Yong Kim, written by Marnie Dickens and Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini, and produced by Elizabeth Kilgarriff,
Marnie Dickens, So Yong Kim and Craig Holleworth
Actors include Jenna Coleman, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Ashley Benson, Eric Balfour, Claire Rushbrook, Talia Balsam and Morgana Van Peebles
Some other reviews of the series follow my own review:
(spoiler alert)
As some of you know from reading my other reviews of "moving pictures", I am not crazy about abuse topics turned into thrillers. It seems to cheapen the topic, but it also seems to go with the times. There are more movies and series about narcissists and psychopaths coming out every day doing the most cruel gruesome selfish deeds to others than anyone who has a job and a life to live can possibly watch.
In one thriller series we watched which looked so promising the first few episodes, the psychopath killer turned out to be a little girl who lived across the street. How depraved do we have to be as a society anyway? That's enlightening? That's entertaining? That's a conclusion that makes the most sense in a long series? That's worth all of the acting, the writing, the cinematography? That's worth our effort in watching it? Not a bit. More than disappointing!
And where are the series about functional couples who have plenty to deal with, and who love each other aside from Amy and Ty in Heartland?
But then Ty had to die in a later season, and some of the audience disappeared too as a result. It shows that many people like and want to see functional happy marriages that aren't boring or sickeningly sweet, as few as they are on T.V. and in the movies these days.
So now I'll write about this series which features a British man, Will, living in the United States gaslighting his Welsh wife, Liv, constantly, trying to make believe he is not having an affair when he plainly is. His wife has caught him many times, and knows a lot more of what he's doing than he perceives. She mostly knows what he's lying about and when, yet she mostly stays silent about it, seeks revenge against him on and off, and continues to stay with him. But what she is silent about is an incredible amount of information: where he goes, what he says to his mistress, where the rendezvous are planned, and the phone messages left to him. So much of what goes on between them are lies and omissions, and one lie and omission covering up other lies and omissions. The intimacy between them is dissolving in front of our eyes, and we wonder if what ever relationship they do have is just one actor outdoing the other.
Granted, there are wives who stay with cheating, lying, gaslighting husbands, but in this series there do not seem to be the kinds of challenges and dangers that most gaslighted wives have to bear, with the entrapments, the smear campaigns behind her back (though he does tell his mistress that he will leave Liv for her), the family pressures to make abusive marriages work (as if abuse and infidelity can be rehabilitated by a spouse - not possible), lots of shaming, threats about leaving, and the issues around how dangerous or unhinged he will be if the wife reveals what she knows (remember that narcissists rage over being or feeling ashamed, and they can be violent when many of their infidelities are uncovered too). There are also the dependencies and co-dependencies in marriages like this, especially when it comes to assets and money - all of it is what many spouses face when they are living with husbands who gaslight. To be fair again, the co-dependency issue is revealed in this series (she is dependent on Will's income). Also revealed is the background story of Liv's family that is in tatters over a father who cheats on her mother to the point of neglecting the daughter to some degree.
Most wives, however, cannot live in marriages like this for many years, and even less so a lifetime, and they suffer tremendously by having to deal with living in a bunch of lies all of the time, never knowing whether their spouse is telling the truth or lying (which can make anyone feel like they are going crazy, even the most stalwart among us, and the instability and stress that having another mistress who is almost like a "pretend spouse" day in and day out brings).
In some ways, she tries to make peace with it, using her stiff British upper lip not to reveal many emotions about any of what she knows and what she is feeling. In mini polygamist style, Liv manages to have some sort of relationship with the woman, Cara, that her husband is having an affair with.
In one scene it is clear that Cara does not know that Liv knows she's Will's mistress. So Cara admits that she has a lover, but that her lover finds her to "not to be enough" and Liv knows who she is talking about (her own husband), and Liv admits she knows exactly how Cara is feeling. It is a poignant moment between two women who are being lied to and manipulated by the same man.
The party of four (which includes Cara's boyfriend, Garth) are on a hiking trip together, with moments of "grin-and-bear-it", some moments of tenderness between the two women, some moments of rage and underlying hostility as Cara, yet again, tries to distract Will into a discreet sexual rendezvous by a waterfall.
Liv and Will talk about Will's affair with Cara when they are back in their hotel room. Liv wonders why she is not enough. Will gets angry and says, "It's not that you aren't enough! It's that you are too much!" He tells her that she is making too many demands on him (very typical for abusive husbands who are having affairs on their wives, the blame shifting). He also brings up the fact that she's financially dependent on him, even though it was his idea - narcissists do like to throw double binds your way.
After drinking a lot of alcohol, and knowing that Will has gone to have sex with Cara, Liv becomes unraveled, and stomps off to the waterfall where the rendezvous between Will and Cara is supposed to take place. Liv thinks she has found her husband (who has his back to her, with the red waterproof jacket he left with), and pushes him off the cliff of the waterfall.
However, it turns out that the person she pushed was not Will, but Cara instead, with Will's jacket on. Will shows up the next morning and Liv is shocked. She knows by then that she pushed someone else other than Will.
Liv has enormous regrets over this fact.
There is one last tender moment between Liv and Cara, as Cara lies in a hospital bed injured from head to toe. Then Cara dies, which sends Liv into shock, and her husband into flat calloused unemotional responses other than wanting to cover up the fact that he was with Cara the night of the murder. Oh, yes! He wants Liv to lie to the police that Will was with her, and not with Cara.
And throughout the thriller Will comes off as an awful coward, and an immature brat-child. He wants to be devoid of responsibility for just about everything (and isn't that so narcissistic?), and is always crying when he pleads to Liv to cover up his sins, and give him a good image to the police, the public, to her mother, and their friends.
But astonishingly, Liv gives Will what he wants: the false alibi to police.
But she also holds it over his head as blackmail, that if he ever lies to her again, she will go to the police and tell them that he was with Cara at the time of the murder. So, in her own way, she is spiraling down with William in terms of ethics.
Liv almost gets into a love relationship with a woman in her building, but tells the woman that she (Liv) is not good enough for that woman.
Feeling "not good enough" can sometimes happen when you stay with narcissists, and cover up for them, and getting so angry at what they are doing that you take your anger to places you would not normally do, which is why a lot of people prefer to leave narcissists instead. Narcissists will always go lower in the ethics department than you when there are challenges, especially about their image, and it becomes another choice as to how low you will go with them. Which is to say that most people have much better ethics than narcissists do, so in the end they sacrifice the relationship they have with the narcissist not to be in that immoral space again.
These are also good reasons not to argue with narcissists, because they will use arguments to get aggressive, abusive, and evil on you. It'll always be a tit-for-tat at the very least, if not an all-out war for them, where they are out destroy who you are and what is left of the relationship. Arguments with narcissists are always about winning something (for them), rather than the kinds of arguments we have with emotionally healthy people: to find a resolution, that, in the end, puts each person's best self forward.
If you try to go in that direction, they will want no part in it. They think they deserve to win the argument, win the power, and win apologies no matter how destructive and bullying they are.
Liv's mother shows up, convinced that Liv is being cheated on by Will. She also uses the visit to come up with evidence that he's cheating. She finds some Polaroids of a scantily clad woman who is not Cara.
But are we really surprised? Most cheaters are usually serial cheaters. The difference is that narcissists use gaslighting (they are much more likely to be pathological liars too, lying and giving false narratives just about everything except the good - or easy - times). Which is to say that when things get really challenging for narcissists or when the mask of their false self starts slipping, they "up" the lying and false narratives, just about always. It's their way of keeping the mask from slipping all the way off, to sound like someone who makes very few mistakes ("only once" as Will says, lying, about his infidelity).
Police do an investigation and suspect Garth for the murder. Garth tells police that he proposed to Cara in their hotel room, that she rejected his proposal, and that he was angry about the rejection, but not enough to push her off of the cliff. Garth also finds out that Liv threw him under the bus and described in such a way that would leave the police suspicious. At this point, she's not only trying to deal with a cheating husband, but also out to save her own ass from arrest and incarceration.
The police do not have enough evidence to convict Garth, so they let him go.
Once he is free again, he shows up at Will and Liv's apartment and puts a gun to Liv's head for throwing him under the bus for the murder. Will admits to Garth that he was the one who was with Cara the night she died. A scuffle takes place, and Liv kills Garth with a present from her mother.
Now Liv has killed two people.
Liv and Will tell police that they were just trying to defend their home, and Will tells police that Garth put a gun to his wife's head, and that he was trying to defend his wife, but never expected to kill him. Police tell Will about New York's "Castle Doctrine", that they are both allowed to use deadly force for the home invasion. It looks like they are both off the hook for the murder of Cara and Garth.
Liv confronts Will about his second mistress. By then, he can't deny that he is a serial cheater and promises to do everything he can to keep Liv, but Liv doesn't believe him. She wants a divorce. He can't think of a divorce (mainly it is because it would tarnish his image with his father and friends back home in England). To keep her from getting a divorce, he blackmails her, and tells her that if she proceeds with a divorce, he will run to the police and tell them that she killed Garth.
So now there are two blackmails: hers if he lies to her again, and his if she proceeds with a divorce. It's a tit-for-tat blackmail.
However, he has already broken his promise about not lying to her again. The more she is confronted with how deep the lies go, the more she wants a divorce. Which is how most of these relationships go. Who wants to be "stuck" with a serial cheater who lies all of the time, and is now getting into the blackmail stage to keep her tethered to him against her will?
When they are at the airport, police stop Liv and Will from boarding the plane to London. Will is brought into custody because the police have the same video that Liv fist saw of Cara and Will engaging in sex. He has lied to police about his relationship to Cara only being for business. He goes to trial and is convicted.
He is wrongly convicted because Liv killed both people.
The ending very much reminded me of "Gaslight" and "Sleeping With the Enemy" where the women get the revenge in the end against their wicked husbands.
The only difference is that this series is about being the victim of lying and cheating instead of about trying to make her crazy, or being the victim of physical assault. All of these situations feel like prison, and all three women want to get out of their marriages in the end. And who can blame them?
But Liv, unlike Paula in "Gaslight", and Sara in "Sleeping with the Enemy", is not as innocent as the other two women. In the end, she lies as much as her husband. Is she as much of a narcissist as he is?
Which is why it is just better to get out of awful relationships before "trouble mounts", as it invariably will either because physical abuse escalates (Sara's dilemma: often to the point of being injured or murdered), or because gaslighting is a coercive control campaign to get another person to think of themselves as insane and undeserving of freedom for the sake of an agenda that the narcissist has, the most common agenda being isolating a woman so that she only has the perpetrator to relate to (Paula's dilemma), or because cheating brings with it so many problems besides the secrets, infidelity and lies (unwanted pregnancies, split loyalties, split time, not being able to count on a partner, stalking lovers, such as this series presents, strong emotions, all kinds of risks and betrayals, split families, family shame, and so on). It's just not worth it!
In the days when "Gaslight" first aired in the movie theaters, women were sometimes "put away" in mental institutions by their husbands, especially abusive husbands who didn't want to stay married to partners they said "I do" to any more, but felt they couldn't get an outright divorce. In those days, divorce was scandalous.
And narcissistic cheating is usually serial cheating with lots of lies, betrayals and a double life. And it is extremely common for narcissists (about 75 percent of them cheat on their spouse - post coming soon).
We all learn in today's world that relationships like these cannot be saved. All of them are being unraveled because of the personality disorder of narcissism, and in many cases, a marriage partner is dealing with all three: the gaslighting, the physical abuse, and the cheating.
And Will does take a swing at Liv towards the end of the series. And he's obviously gaslighting her too, although it is "gaslighting lite" as most narcissists will try to convince their partners that it is the partner's fault that the narcissist is cheating every single time he is getting caught at it (Will isn't doing it every time, just some of the time, thus the "narcissism lite" label).
Psychologist professor Sam Vaknin has said numerous times in his videos that when we are in close personal relationships with narcissists, we become a little narcissistic too, that their narcissism rubs off on us. Researcher and clinical psychologist with the California State University at Los Angeles, Dr. Ramani Durvasula, denies that wholeheartedly from everything I've heard her say. And then there are websites that use the word "fleas" to connotate that someone has picked up some narcissistic traits temporarily from living full time with a narcissist, either condoning the way they are behaving, or enabling it, or lying for them, or bullying someone for the narcissist. However, when the flea-ridden person leaves the narcissist, they lose the narcissism.
I don't know. I think there are probably no absolutes. I'm keeping my eye on this phenomenon, since there are so many opinions, but I would bet that a lot of us non-narcissists get caught in arguments where our ethics aren't as clean as we'd like them to be when we engage with narcissists, especially when the narcissist is trying to justify abuse, or cheating, or gaslighting, or being hypercritical and cruel but can't stand criticism themselves. Do we go as far as Liv goes? Not by a long shot. I'd say that most of us get on the defensive, and exasperated that the narcissist is taking none of what we have to say into consideration, and in the frustration we shoot some verbal barbs at them: "You're not worth talking to!", "You don't care a shred about what I'm saying! All you do is hear yourself talk!", "All you want is a war? What's the matter with you!?" - all of this is shaming, something narcissists do in spades. We don't want to be like them, yet we do sometimes in this regard.
A long time ago when I met with a psychologist following a break-up, she said, "Don't argue with narcissists! You'll always regret it because they get into 'the muck': insulting, abusing, hurting, destroying. They bait you to get into an argument either to fine-tune themselves to win the argument, or because you're seeing who they really are behind the false facade. Just walk away every time they start one!"
Who wants to fight with an unethical person hell-bent on getting the worse possible outcome?
And it is something Liv discovers too. It's not worth discussing his infidelities any more. In the end, she's disgusted. Most of us do become disgusted with narcissists, plus we are too traumatized to continue. She just wants out. He's destroyed her in some ways, and in the end she's destroyed him by being an accomplice to his incarceration, and destroyed two others by taking their lives.
That's something to be proud of? Not.
As a thriller, it may be a perfectly good movie/series, but in terms of covering cheating and gaslighting in a meaningful way? This series fell short for me on multiple levels. I think "Gaslight" and "Sleeping With the Enemy" are better thrillers than this one because they showed in a much better way the consequences of being in a close personal relationship with a narcissistic-sociopathic husband.
But all three moving pictures had disappointing endings.
In one scene Liv calls herself "a bunny boiler" referring to another thriller movie about abuse, this time stalking and terrorizing. That movie is "Fatal Attraction". She could be like the protagonist in "Fatal Attraction", wanting to save her marriage and punish him at the same time, but got too exhausted with his pathology to keep her end of the marriage going.
So is this series about two narcissists betraying one another? It could be. She does show some empathy towards Cara, the other woman, so maybe she has "fleas". Again, whether an adult can get some narcissistic traits just by being in the proximity of a narcissist is still under debate. We know that children who are either looking on or being molded via constant shame, rewards and punishments can certainly end up with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but we don't know whether adults, who tend to have more fixed personalities can be.
I gave this series three stars because I suppose it is possible for a situation to really happen in this way, though rare, and because it shows pretty accurately how cheating narcissists act, and why staying and interacting with the lies they spout and their string of thoughtless, compulsive acts of infidelity aren't a good idea.
The flaws in the series leave possibilities for other writers and producers to step in and make a much better story. While cognitive dissonance, and being torn as to whether a wife can make her marriage work, or whether she needs to go through a divorce, is certainly part of the picture for awhile (and child abuse survivors, especially scapegoats who have been groomed to think there are options to being abused and betrayed in hostage-like emotionally abusive toxic environments, tend to stay the longest, work the hardest, get the most symptoms, and leave with a lot of regrets that they wasted so much of their lives on unhappy experiences and stubbornly unchangeable narcissists). That part of the picture can stay, and even with more of a background story to make it more plausible (seeing her Mom work hard to get her Dad to stop cheating).
But to make a meaningful story, the rest of it isn't necessary. I suppose Liv could still push Cara off the cliff in a significant black-out drunken state, but the repercussions should be more thoughtfully portrayed: the consequences of being drunk, the consequences of giving up on your own self care to deal with narcissistic manipulations, crazy-making and blackmailing, the consequences of being so angry that you feel compelled to drink so much that you do things you are not aware of in your black-out state, the consequences of the crime, the consequences of going along with a partner's desires for a fake alibi who thinks police will arrest him just because he was with his mistress just before or after she was pushed.
While it would be a completely different story, the point is that it would be a more poignant story, taking into consideration what police and judges actually do in these cases, and the public's response, especially since cheating in marriages no longer has legal ramifications aside from coercive control (in the United Kingdom where the story starts, coercive control is illegal, but not in New York yet, though it is being considered).
FURTHER READING
Critics reviews on Rotten Tomatoes about Wilderness
The Cool Girl Gets Lost in Wilderness - by Roxana Hadadi for Vulture, New York
excerpt:
... Liv can’t work, so the former journalist — we never learn what she used to write about — spends her days at home working on her novel, which is implied to be the story we’re currently watching. “I was whoever people needed me to be. When it was safe to, I stopped pretending. Finally, I could just be me,” Liv says of her relationship with Will in voice-over narration, but their seemingly perfect marriage doesn’t last. Will is cheating on Liv, and when she learns that what he swore was a one-night stand is actually a monthslong affair, she plans to murder him during a road trip through the American West. ...
Wilderness Amazon page
but the core morality of this show is so twisted in contemporary politics that its painful to watch. This series seems to fit with an agenda which justifies that people wronged- specifically women being wronged- are essentially in their rights to inact the worst crimes.
the main character commits an actual crime which is somehow justified and not her fault.
the other female main characters has back story that tries to explain away her behaviour. Its called backon right at the end of the series, where once again, its women who are disadvantaged and pushed to these acts because of men/ society and what standards they have been set.
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I will say that both married folks have deep-seated mental issues from unpleasant, though not tragic childhoods, (far worse parents exist), and I believe there are crimes that can be committed that might warrant injury or death, especially in the spur of the moment (catching ones spouse in bed with another, etc.). However, what the wife did was plan out the murder of her husband. Legally, that is 1st degree murder, in any state, and isn't likely to be justified by infidelity, which was the only crime committed, when she started planning the murder.
Plus, frankly, no one is worth going to jail for. I guess for some, the satisfaction of hurting or killing someone who cheated on them might appear to be worth it, while being put to death by society, or spending the rest of ones life in jail, might allow for time to reconsider.
I also found it interesting that she took him right back the first time and he refused to let her go, despite clearly continuing to cheat on her and possibly intend to leave her at a later date, with a lot more pain for all concerned.
