Baba Yaga has enjoyed one of folklore’s longest careers. She has lived in a hut on chicken legs, flown about in a mortar, steered with a pestle, terrified generations of Slavic children, cropped up in Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and lent her name to a certain hitman played by Keanu Reeves. So it is only fair that Carrie-Anne Moss, Trinity to Keanu’s Neo, finally gets a go. Yaga, an eight-part half-hour mystery that drags the old witch into a modern Canadian fishing town, premieres with two episodes on Friday 23 October on Crave in Canada and AMC+ in the US.
The setup is pure small-town noir. A private investigator called Rapp (Noah Reid, Schitt’s Creek) arrives in the coastal town of Whittock to look for Henry Park (Hudson Williams, Heated Rivalry), the missing heir to a powerful fishery. He soon locks horns with Carson (Clark Backo), a local detective who would clearly prefer he went home, and meets Moss’s Katherine, whom the official blurb describes as a charismatic university professor with a taste for younger men. Add secret lives, enigmatic suspects and ancient magic, and you have Twin Peaks as rewritten by a folklore tutor with a grudge.
The series comes from Kat Sandler’s 2019 stage play, and she writes and showruns, with Moss among the executive producers. Sandler has pitched the show as reclaiming the wicked witch as a feminist antihero. At San Diego Comic-Con she wondered aloud what might happen if the invisibility that settles on older women could be turned into a weapon. That is a sharper idea than most streaming loglines, and a very old one in folk tales, where the crone at the crossroads is always more than she seems. Directing duties are shared between David Frazee and Rachel Talalay, the latter responsible for Tank Girl and some of the finest modern Doctor Who. The supporting cast includes Sheila McCarthy, Megan Follows and Katharine Isabelle, who knows a thing or two about folkloric transformations after Ginger Snaps.
The trailer leans hard on mood: foggy Vancouver Island coastline, unsettling candlelit glimpses and Alanis Morissette covering Donovan’s “Season of the Witch”. Moss supplies a monologue on the witch’s many guises, in which Baba Yaga variously tests the hero, kills him, eats him, and does a fourth thing we can’t print before the watershed. Noah Reid has promised viewers will be surprised by “the sheer amount of chicken stuff,” which is either a nod to the hut or a very niche sideline in poultry horror.
Early notices are mixed. The Hollywood Reporter enjoyed the playful tone and found the half-hour episodes easy to binge, but felt the early promise gives way to uneven execution. Episodes then arrive weekly each Friday, building to a two-episode finale on 27 November. British viewers have a slightly longer wait: Sky and NOW have the UK and Irish rights, with a date still to be confirmed.
Any series that promises both feminist rage and a meaningful quantity of poultry has our attention. The house on chicken legs was always the best special effect in Slavic folklore. It would be a shame if it didn’t get up and walk at least once.
Watch the trailer on YouTube: Yaga – Official Trailer
Join the conversation (0)