The Wreck Review: Dive (or sink) into this weird and wacky thriller

With so many ways to watch TV these days, it’s rare to find a show that clearly fits into a certain category, but A wreckthe horror thriller set on a cruise ship couldn’t go anywhere else but BBC Three.

It stars young actors, is about the young being youthful, and is full of lofty characters and antics. There is so much color, energy and hormones on screen that it makes you (okay, me) feel older just by looking at it.

It opens with a woman diving into a pool and doing some calm lengths, which unfortunately has been exactly the case in recent seasons Industry and The Fall Began, to name just two that come to mind. Enough horrible solo scenes in pools, please.

Silliness aside, things soon pick up when a duck-masked killer and a knife-wielding Southwesterner chase a girl around a cruise ship. Three months later, the girl’s brother, 19-year-old Jamie (Oscar Kennedy), joins the crew on the ship with a basic purpose: to find out what happened to his sister.

Subtlety isn’t Wreck’s forte, but he doesn’t look for subtlety (see: duck mask). Writer Ryan J Brown took his premise of a cruise ship as a mostly lawless city-state full of closeted people who want to escape whatever happened to them ashore and run with it.

His method—throw everything from high comedy to gore and see what sticks—is enthusiastically adopted by director Chris Baugh, who uses a candy-colored palette along with a hyperkinetic camera to create the whole thing. exactly as non-relaxing as I imagine a cruise vacation to be.

So there are inevitably misfires – I’m not sure we need another shady multinational corporation running the good ship Sacramentum here any more than we needed another girl diving into the pool. But like a punk band on their debut, Wreck’s energy is infectious. Everyone on the ship is a suspect and no one can get off. If only so Death on the Nile with ADHD, okay: I still want to know who he is. And why are they wearing a duck mask.