Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Hulu
If your nightmares involve a group of pale children dressed like Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and wearing Sia wigs, I’m sorry to say that Hulu’s new series, The Clearing (premiering on Hulu May 24), is not for you. It’ll simply be too hair-raising, too bloodcurdling, and too downright dreadful for you to make it past even the premiere episode’s opening scene.
Lucky for the rest of us, who don’t live in fear of a world populated by 2014 Maddie Zieglers, we can watch The Clearing with little problem. Well, unless you consider the show’s thematic density to be a problem, or its chilling depiction of ruthless cult tactics—which are no easier to handle than that opening image, but doled out with grace and prudence throughout the series’ first four episodes. That’s on full display from that first scene, where a young girl named Sarah (Lily LaTorre) is kidnapped from an Australian back road on the way home from school, after being lured into danger by another girl, Amy (Julia Savage)—one of the series’ many bleach blonde bob-sporting kids.
Sarah’s anger and fear are forcefully subdued, and she’s told that she’ll now be called Asha. Her confusion briefly dissipates when her captors tell her that they’re taking Sarah home to her mother, whom Sarah quickly finds out is not her birth mother, but rather an imposingly prim and proper middle-aged woman, Adrienne (Miranda Otto), who leads a cult called The Kindred.