There's so much to want to love in Canadian series Yaga, from its small-town mystery to its hints of folklore and witchcraft. But the biggest draw of all is undoubtedly its cast, which includes Carrie-Anne Moss, Noah Reid, Clark Backo, and Heated Rivalry breakout Hudson Williams.
Yaga is Williams' first major project to come out since the runaway success of Heated Rivalry catapulted him and co-star Connor Storrie to stardom. With that comes an opportunity for Williams to further showcase his range beyond his Canadian Screen Award-winning work as Shane Hollander. It's a shame, then, that Yaga gives Williams and his co-stars so little to latch onto, in a dark feminist fable that feels more hollow than revelatory.
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What's Yaga about?
Based on the play by Kat Sandler, who also serves as showrunner, Yaga invites us to the small town of Whittock, where Henry Park (Williams), heir to a powerful fishery owner, has gone missing. Enter private investigator Rapp (Reid) and local police detective Carson (Backo), who are paired — reluctantly, on Carson's end — to get to the bottom of this mystery.
What begins as a standard missing persons investigation soon becomes something darker and stranger. Chicken carcasses hang menacingly on doors. Bloody symbols mar crime scenes. Through it all, Rapp hears whispers of Baba Yaga, a legendary witch from Slavic folklore known for living in a house on chicken legs and flying around in a mortar and pestle. Could Henry's disappearance be tied to the occult? Given that the whole series opens with images of an unknown figure being burned at the stake, and that each episode opens and closes with a voiceover monologue from a wizened witchy figure, the answer appears to be an unequivocal "yes."
So the stage is set for a strange, folkloric mystery. Yet Yaga's witchiness never truly sings. Too often, the show resorts to the same style of surreal fakeout dream sequences, where a stream of bloody feathers and foreboding masks blends into a shorthand for horror without truly scaring. The voiceovers, presented as coming from Baba Yaga herself, offer up platitudes about women who have been othered as witches, but they feel familiar to anyone who's ever read a "we are the granddaughters of the witches you couldn't burn" bumper sticker.
Hudson Williams pulls double duty in Yaga.
At the center of this witchy vortex is Williams' Henry, who mostly haunts Rapp and Carson's investigation in flashbacks, including a steamy podcast recording with him and intriguing professor Katherine (Moss), an expert in all things bone. Henry's not alone: Williams also plays Logan, Henry's roommate, podcasting partner, and doppelganger. (Yaga sticks Williams in a prosthetic nose and fake acne for the Logan role, and the result is a jarring trip to the uncanny valley.)
A dual role should be rich territory for any actor to mine, yet neither Henry nor Logan get enough screen time for Williams' double turn to truly sink in. Henry is primarily a confident, if sleazy, charmer, while Logan is mostly presented as an awkward, almost wooden foil to that charm. Logan was not a character in the original stage play, and it shows in his thinness here.
Yaga introduces a fascinating thread about Logan perhaps wanting to be (or maybe be with) Henry, but it rarely pulls it beyond the occasional unsettling sex scene. While onscreen intimacy can often be a great showcase of character dynamics, here, these scenes are often over too fast or accompanied by a voiceover that explains said dynamics without letting the actual performances breathe.
As Yaga unfurls, Henry and Logan become much more sinister figures. While the thought of Williams taking a villainous turn is an exciting one, his Henry and Logan don't make particularly compelling villains because we know so little of them. Yaga's leads don't tend to fare much better. Moss is slippery fun as Katherine, but too often she remains on the margins. Backo and Reid's buddy cop dynamic is punchy, yet often dragged down by Rapp's incessant flirting. That most of the women in Whittock practically throw themselves at him is one of Yaga's most infuriating features. As it happens again and again and again, these women's advances bypass sexual empowerment and move straight into bewilderment.
Yaga gestures out to interesting concepts, but ultimately, it never dives deep enough. As an examination of witchcraft as a conduit for female rage, it's not angry enough. As an erotic thriller, it's not titillating enough. As a mystery, its twists and turns are intriguing, but never quite captivating. The ingredients for success are there, but they never quite come together to cast the right spell.