What to stream this week: Toni Collette’s culty thriller and five more picks

Wayward ★★★½ (Netflix)

This time, it’s official: you’re terrible, Evelyn. In this knotty American mystery-thriller Muriel’s Wedding star Toni Collette plays Evelyn Wade, the beatific administrator of a facility for troubled teenagers whose desire to help is confronting.

“Most people go their entire lives without a proper hug,” Evelyn will declare, embracing someone she’s just met and then never truly letting go. With a serene smile and sadistic instincts, Evelyn is that modern monster writ large: the wellness guru. Collette masterfully draws every drop of malevolence from the role.

Steadily revealed, Evelyn is the show’s fulcrum, seen at wildly different angles by the other characters. For police officer Alex Dempsey (Mae Martin, the show’s creator), Evelyn is the mentor to his now-pregnant partner, Laura Redman (Sarah Gadon), who turned Laura’s life around years ago at the Tall Pines Academy. For Canadian teens Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind) and Abbie (Sydney Topliffe), newly arrived at Tall Pines after the besties’ rebellious phase sapped their parents’ patience, Evelyn is the smiling prison warden looking to break them.

Martin, a former stand-up comedian who previously made the uneasy comic-drama Feel Good, has engineered a deceptively ambitious show. What you might think is obvious is just the beginning. Yes, Evelyn’s self-belief is troubling, the town of Tall Pines is far too idyllic and the Academy’s set-up is questionable. But the narrative then adds in new elements, genres and twisting personal dynamics. There are looming conspiracies, jailbreak planning and lashings of horror. The ramifications gnaw away: is healing someone really just a means of controlling them?

There are echoes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Rosemary’s Baby, but the writing is particularly good when it comes to the bonds that tie people together. Set in 2003 – the lack of mobile phones adds to the isolation – Wayward never forgets that Leila and Abbie are teenagers, complete with misjudged priorities and rituals that Tall Pines systematically strips away. The relationship between Alex, a transgender man, and Sarah also has a friction sharpened by looming parenthood and shifting priorities.

Though Wayward may be several interesting shows instead of one precise production, it does have a compelling glue to hold it together. Collette brings Evelyn’s purpose to life not with a villain’s pleasure but a zealot’s certainty. She’s convinced she’s doing the right thing and coolly exults in her methods. With Leila and Abbie as terrified lightning rods, group therapy sessions for the Tall Pines students have the bile and frenzy of a cult’s indoctrination. “Converge,” commands Evelyn, and the battered participants form a single writhing entity. Collette makes Wayward hum.

Watching You ★★★ (Stan*)

Some thrillers can’t slow down: they need momentum to keep the characters and the audience off-balance and reacting. That’s the case with the reflexively tight Australian limited series, which barrels through a cascading story that circles notions of pleasure and coercion without ever really pausing to examine them. At a certain point, the key players become fitted pieces in a plot-based machine. To be fair, it’s an efficient one.

As a Sydney paramedic who enjoys the challenge of life-or-death situations, Lina (Aisha Dee) is not entirely ready for a big wedding and family life with firefighter boyfriend Cain (Chai Hansen). Testing her boundaries, she seduces willing new acquaintance Dan (Josh Helman) in the short stay rental property of friends Axel (Luke Cook) and Clare (Laura Gordon). Lina’s self-doubt turns to panic and paranoia soon after, when the first anonymous message with surveillance footage of the hook-up arrives.

Liberally adapted by creators Alexei Mizin and Ryan Van Dijk from the JP Pomare novel The Last Guests, Watching You makes sure Lina is never merely a saintly victim. She’s tempted to follow infidelity with other failings to keep her secret, and the unease wells up in Dee’s sturdy performance. Some intriguing terrain, including the entrepreneurial excess of Axel and Clare, falls by the wayside, but nothing can slow this show’s sprint.

English Teacher (season two) ★★★★½ (Disney+)

No sophomore slump here. Brian Jordan Alvarez’s sitcom about a gay high school teacher in Austin, Texas, was the best new comedy of 2024, with the new batch of episodes not missing a beat in capturing the same punchlines and pick-me-ups that come from living through the day-to-day reality of America’s contradictions. Often trying to get his own way through questionable methods, Alvarez’s Evan Marquez remains a lightning rod for the show’s idiosyncratic educators and delightfully deadpan students. The new season’s dinner party episode, written by co-star Stephanie Koenig, is a hilarious set-piece.

All of You ★★★ (Apple TV+)

As Roy Kent, the hard nut with a heart of gold in Ted Lasso, the English comic, writer, and actor Brett Goldstein made his name with a deserved Emmy-winning performance. But I wasn’t sold on Goldstein’s work for a crucial role in the second season of Shrinking, the Jason Segel Apple TV+ comedy he co-created. He’s back on top here, for this sci-fi-tinged romantic-comedy where Imogen Poots and Goldstein play best friends in the near future whose obvious attraction is put aside because a test has told them they’re not soulmates. The film aches with longing.

Haunted Hotel ★★½ (Netflix)

Rick and Morty writer Matt Roller pivots from science-fiction to horror with this agreeable but hardly galvanising animated comedy. It starts with a reluctant Katherine (Eliza Coupe) and her two children taking over the Undervale Hotel, a business owned by her late brother Nathan (Will Forte), who is still available to consult – he’s a spirit, one of many, attached to the property. A mix of Ghosts and The Shining, Haunted Hotel is always palatable. If anything, it’s overly sentimental, pursuing familial bonds and grand gestures amidst the supernatural hi-jinxes.

Caleb Hearon: Model Comedian ★★★½ (HBO Max)

Stand-up comedy is often now one of the fronts in America’s cultural wars, but in his first special, Chicago native Caleb Hearon navigates the partisan poison with a deceptively genial commentary that uses self-deprecation and sly digs to mark out his space. Hearon, a gay artist who is riding the wave of a burgeoning online presence, finds the humour in being supportive and taking pleasure in being alive. Positivity is his unexpected weapon, even as he jokes about being bullied as a child or his difficult relationship with his late father, and it works.

* Stan is owned by Nine, which also publishes this masthead.

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