Review: 'Outer Range' a Lynchean Dive into Mysteries Familial and Cosmic
There are a couple of recurring motifs in Brian Watkins' eight-episode series "Outer Range," which streams in Amazon starting April 15. For one thing, a number of characters seem to have spirit animals, or at least creatures that stop by at key moments; Royal Abbot (Josh Brolin), the patriarch of a family of ranchers, keeps encountering a buffalo, which, despite the arrows hanging from its shoulder, is at last alive. Royal's neighbor Wayne Tillerson (Will Patton) has a habit of confiding in (and sometimes screaming at) his own buffalo pal, though in Wayne's case it's stuffed and mounted.
Meantime, Royal's increasingly distraught wife, Cecilia (Lili Taylor), keeps having strange (and sometimes deadly) interactions with bears; meantime, Autumn (Imogen Poots), the effervescent, somewhat unhinged young woman who has obtained permission to camp out on the Abbots' land, exchanges salutations of "Shalom!" with a bear in her turn.
The other recurring theme is that just about the people in the series seem to be in some serious need of therapy. That includes not just Royal, whose tense demeanor grows more and more tightly wound, and Wayne, whose freaked-out vibe is eventually explained in a startling flashback, but their kids, too. Royal's elder son. Perry (Tom Pelphrey), drifts mournfully through the series like a man only half there; in a sense, that's true, since his wife went missing months ago. Younger son Rhett (Lewis Pullman) is a rudderless himbo hoping to make a name for himself on the rodeo circuit, but his boozing and sleeping around isn't helping his ambitions.
Another missing person (after the first episode) is Wayne's son, Trever (Matt Lauria). His disappearance commands the not-entirely-welcome attention of local deputy Joy Hawk (Tamara Podemski), who could use a headline-making case to boost her chances of winning the impending election for sheriff. Hawk's suspicions fall on the Abbots, as do the suspicions of Tillerson's other two sons, the sharp-witted Luke (Shaun Sipos) and the sweet, but dim, Billy (Noah Reid).
It's understandable, since the Tillersons have embarked on a campaign of legal legerdemain to steal a parcel of land from the Abbots —�a parcel that includes some strange minerals and, as it happens, a mysterious hole that seethes with weird energies. But it's not long before Royal, and then others in the community, start to suspect that the hole could be linked to all the strange occurrences taking place in the area: Not just missing people and stray buffalo, but mountains that seem to flicker in and out of existence, reports of mastodons, perhaps most ominous, a crockpot that's about to boil over and unleash who knows what sorts of chaos.
These are cosmic mysteries for sure — not the sort of thing you're likely to find in the real life state of Wyoming (where this reviewer grew up in part), but certainly palatable when the Wyoming in a fiction such as this (it looks more like Canada to me) possesses the haunted strangeness of David Lynch's forest-bound Twin Peaks.
The viewer knows early on what happened to Trever, and it's a secret that drives the Abbotts and the Tillersons ever closer to all-out war. It's also the triggering factor in the another of the show's touchstones: Almost everyone involved in the series either commits, attempts, or is an accessory to murder. Not since the Johnson County range war has Wyoming seen such a flurry of potentially lethal violence. Add to the mix of suspects and perpetrators Wayne's cold-blooded ex-wife Patricia (Deirdre O'Connell), and you won't know where the next wild twist is liable to come from.
Smart, soulful, and even cuttingly comic on occasion, "Outer Range" finds a new home for the far-out, supernaturally-tinged mystery genre and proves one of the most original and captivating series to show up recently on this, or any other, streaming service.
"Outer Range" streams on Amazon starting April 15.