Karl Puschmann: Cannibalism, cults and cold-blooded murder. Yellowjackets loses none of its sting

Melanie Lynskey as Shauna in the second season of Yellowjackets. Streaming on Neon.

You don’t want to ignore the buzz around Yellowjackets. Like the summer-bastard wasps that it’s named after, the show attacks you with brutal sting after brutal sting leaving you no time to recover before circling and striking again.

In just the first episode of the second season, which begins streaming tonight on Neon and screening on SoHo on Monday, the show hits you with a bloody stabbing, some old-fashioned extortion, violent electric-shock therapy, rough but consensual sex, a murder cover-up, an animal-masked death cult and a poor sod being buried alive before wrapping things up with some cannibalism to lead into the end credits. It’s certainly flying straight at your viewing jugular.

Which is a good thing. Season one was the breakout show of last year, winning stacks of awards and being nominated for seven Emmys. Which, yes, is an unusual amount of praise for a survival horror/murder mystery series with strong paranormal overtones. It’s also unusual because the show is determinedly freakish, delighting in mining nightmares for material and soaking them in a grungy 90s music-video aesthetic.

Juliette Lewis as Natalie and Christina Ricci as Misty in Yellowjackets.

It gets away with it because in some ways it’s two distinct shows. To quickly recap, Yellowjackets is about the survivors of a girls’ soccer team whose plane crashes into the wilderness en route to a tournament. It cleverly splits itself into two timelines. First, we go back to the mid-90s, where we follow the teenagers fighting for their lives against a supremely hostile environment and, increasingly, each other before zooming forward to the present day with the now-adult women trying to cope with the untold actions of their survival and the associated trauma involved with that.

The show flips between these dual timelines with confidence and flair, sometimes multiple times in a scene. It often uses these time jumps to mirror the past with the present or to explain certain character traits or behaviours. It’s an addictive and endlessly interesting format that allows the show to continue pushing forward, layer puzzling mystery on top of gruesome murders and keep things zipping along.

Unlike other shows that teased out their secrets for years, twisting themselves into knots trying to keep viewers guessing until the big end reveal after several seasons only proved they’d been winging it the whole time, Yellowjackets moves with an assured purpose. It balances questions with answers in both timelines, while still leaving you dying to know what happens next. If the writers are as lost in the woods as their characters then they’re doing a bloody good job of not showing it.

Melanie Lynskey in Yellowjackets, season 2. Photo / Supplied

A lot of the hype has gone to our very own Melanie Lynskey, who expertly leads the ensemble as Shauna, a disenchanted housewife turned accidental murderer and crash survivor. She’s so believable as an exhausted mother yearning for the excitement and life that she felt while stranded in the woods, moving with the world on her shoulders and sizzling into life whenever things take a turn for a worse. Which they often do.

She’s backed up by the always excellent Juliette Lewis, who riffs on her cool gal, rock n’ roll persona, Tawny Cypress, whose feral alter-ego has driven a blood-stained wedge between her and her family and the show’s MVP Christina Ricci, whose terrifying portrayal of Misty, a nerdy “citizen detective” with an endless capacity for violence, is unnervingly believable.

Most of the questions set up in the first season’s cliffhanger ending get answered and build to the reveal of another Aotearoa actress in a main part. Simone Kessell joins the cast as the adult version of survivor Lottie. Her dark visions and prophecies as a teen in the woods lead her to establishing herself as a cult leader in the second season.

The show has lost none of its bleak outlook, macabre imagery or black humour. For a show with as much awful, freaky stuff going on, it’s also very funny. After setting such high expectations last year, it’s a massive relief to be able to say that in its second season, Yellowjackets has lost none of its sting.

As long as you can stomach the odd bit of cannibalism.