Untamed review: Eric Bana and Sam Neill face the wilderness in Netflix crime drama

Let’s get the obvious out of the way.

Untamed is a miniseries starring Australian Eric Bana and New Zealander Sam Neill, but they are playing Americans in a story set in Yosemite National Park but the show was actually filmed in Canada.

There’s a bit of dissonance there, but you’ll get over it quickly.

Streaming shows are increasingly engineered to open with a punch (they don’t want you clicking away after 40 seconds), and Untamed has a whopper.

Two abseilers are hanging off a rock face when a body from above plummets towards them. It gets caught up in the ropes that connect the two, and the velocity and weight of the body pulls on their anchors. The body threatens to drag the abseilers to their deaths.

Despite the dramatic opening, Untamed is often a more patient show, until it’s really not.

The body is a young woman named Lucy and she has injuries that suggest her death is far from the suicide some park officers want to believe. A sceptic is Kyle Turner (Bana), a senior investigator for the National Parks Service.

Kyle, newbie Naya (Lily Santiago) is told, wants to do things the hard way. He’s a rugged, laconic kind of guy – prefers horses over vehicles to get around, not a big “here’s what I’m thinking and feeling” sort.

Naya learns pretty early on that Kyle and his ex-wife Jill (Rosemarie DeWitt) suffered a great tragedy when their young son was abducted in the park, and his body later found.

The park is full of secrets and dangers, and Lucy’s death is connected to her history in it, a past that triggers questions about other open cases.

Everyone has a story that is slowly revealed – Naya, and why she moved to the park service from Los Angeles with her young son; gun-toting hunter Shane (Wilson Bethel) for whom Kyle has a particular dislike; and Kyle’s boss Paul (Neill).

The title, Untamed, should, in theory, refer to the wildness of Yosemite (and the Canadian landscapes, standing in for California, are stunning and greatly elevates the series’ look), but, obviously, the real dangers are men.

It’s man’s heart and soul you can’t tame or control. Whether that’s falling down secret shafts or discovering the tragic history of the victim, it’s humans that are the real threat. Bears seem easy enough to scare off with a couple of gunshots in the air.

Untamed was created by Mark L. Smith and Elle Smith, and the former is also behind American Primeval, another Netflix series that taps into the lawlessness of the American west, plus the screenplays for The Revenant, The Midnight Sky, The Marsh King’s Daughter and Twisters.

There’s a theme here, Smith likes stories removed from the civility of cities and suburbs, where humans reveal their true natures when they’re not buttressed by modern social structures.

Untamed flirts with this, even if it doesn’t have anything specifically profound to say, but at least the scenes look pretty.

The series is middling, a by-the-book murder mystery with the veneer of something distinct. But once it’s exhausted all the plot twists and revelations, you know you’ve seen it all before.

It has shades of better shows such as True Detective or The Killing but is closer to the genre’s more mediocre entries such as The Sinner.

On the plus-side, Bana is always an arresting presence on screen, and Santiago holds her own against her more experienced scene partner.

Untamed is inoffensive, like, it’s fine, and it will likely be top of Netflix’s charts before the weekend. But there’s not much about it that’s memorable.

Untamed is streaming on Netflix