We’re all drowning in content—so it’s time to highlight the best. In her column, published every Friday, critic Clarisse Loughrey recommends a new show to watch. This week: the BBC Three thriller Wreck, paying homage to the great 80s horror movies with fresh queer characters.
Wreck: Season 1
I wondered how exactly BBC Three’s new horror-comedy Wreck would work. It’s a full-throated homage to the 1980s slasher flick—long knives, plastic shower curtains, neon lights, reckless teens, and breezy pop. Other countries have had their own masked killers. Italy, for one, has its giallo films: Blood and Black Lace, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, A Bay of Blood. But the legacy of Halloween and Friday the 13th is such a uniquely US phenomenon, birthed from its white-picket suburbs and half-rusted summer camps.
These films dealt with bogeymen of political dimensions, in a way that even the recent Halloween sequel trilogy has commendably tackled and regrettably fumbled. They were manifestations of the American dream curdled under the fractious reality of inequality and intolerance, leading directly into the conservative consumption of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
What does that mean, for Wreck, then—a thoroughly British production, about a killer set loose on a cruise ship filled with a young and rowdy crew of staff members? The series can’t totally resist the allure of its Yankee origins. The vessel in question is run by a company called Velorum. Its recruitment video features an American voice, promising its newbies “the best summer of your lives”. The cruise director is a tanned and pearly-toothed American, too. This isn’t a flaw, but a feature. Wreck is, tonally, exactly the kind of bouncy Brit comedy you’d expect to see on BBC Three, but it doesn’t treat the slasher as mere aesthetic. Those US-centric touches are there specifically to signal the dark heart that lies behind the shiny and plastic and oh-so-chirpy.
Wreck’s protagonist, 19-year-old Jamie (Oscar Kennedy), has snuck on board, posing as an employee named Cormac, in order to find out what happened to his sister (Jodie Tyack’s Pippa). In a prologue sequence, we get a taste of what went down: she was attacked by a killer dressed in, of all things, a yellow duck mascot outfit. With Wreck being so resolutely Gen Z, it seems like he might have walked right out of a frame from cult video game Five Nights at Freddy’s, where smiling animal mascots wreak chaos and murder. There we go again—the sweet turned deadly.
Jamie discovers all manner of secrets hidden in the bowels of Velorum’s ship: the performers, who strut around like a pack of high school mean girls, are caught up in some kind of shady drug war. A tattoo artist nicknamed The Baby (Francis Flores) rules over the engine room. Director Chris Baugh contrasts the clinical mundanity of the staff quarters with the sickly, Jazz Age luxury of the first-class cabins. The leering faces of the casino patrons twist to the point of ghoulishness.
Writer Ryan J Brown plays his notes broad and silly, but there’s a firm understanding here of how these spaces operate under certain power dynamics. An offhand story about one of the officers forcing a girl to “do a fart in a jar” may sound like a bit of puerile humour, but you soon realise everyone on this ship is ready to humiliate someone else in order to maintain their own, fragile sense of insecurity. A crew member jokingly refers to manager-sergeant Karen (Harriet Webb) as “Aunt Lydia”. They’re not so wildly off the mark.
Wreck’s twists are fun, though rarely unexpected. But I was most struck by the small moments of solidarity Jame finds with his crewmates. Both Jamie and Vivian (Thaddea Graham) are gay. They haven’t told their families, choosing instead to run off to a place that’s so chaotic, there’s rarely much energy to be spent on such quotidian, personal prejudices. When everywhere’s descended into a turf war, that leaves just enough room to find your own patch of freedom. “I thought running off to be a sailor was the gayest option,” Vivian jokes.
Wreck is always in danger of being swallowed up by its own reference points. But those moments, between Jamie and Vivian, bring it all back down to Earth. It’s proof you can export the slasher, as long you understand what keeps people wielding the knife.
