Reviews
[Review] We Worship Hulu’s Cult Series, “The Path”!
Hulu’s latest nail biter of a drama is absolutely a cult that you want to get yourself inducted into for the long haul
“Once you begin to know the Ladder, all the pain, all the horrible things that have happened to you will disappear.”
“No they won’t.”
The Path is the stuff that the very best kind of television is made of. A lot of that has to do with the fact that cults are fascinating subject matter—or more specifically—the mind control aspect of cults makes for enlightening material. There’s a reason that David Tenant’s brainwashing Kilgrave on Jessica Jones resonated with so many people. Mind manipulation is just straight up interesting, and the topic of cults takes this superhuman idea and somehow makes it incredibly human. We’ve all been at low points when we’ve wanted to believe in a higher power or that something larger could help us out, and The Path very much cuts directly into people during those moments in their lives.
Coming from Jessica Goldberg, a playwright and writer for Parenthood, who brings executive producer Jason Katims from her alma matter along with her, the two know how to effectively build a world. The steady drip of characters here is also reminiscent of Katims’ strong work on Friday Night Lights, a show that could also go to pretty sinister places when given the opportunity. Add to that that you also have Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad) and Hugh Dancy (Hannibal) back on television after their pivotal series, and the promise of getting to see the two of them going head-to-head with each other is certainly something to get excited over. Even only one episode in, the show is already giving delicious glimpses of what’s to come with these two.
The series opens to some devastation in North Carolina, courtesy of a tornado, with Cal Stephens (Dancy) swooping in to save the survivors with his movement, The Meyerists. Much of this first episode is framed around Mary (Emma Greenwell), a frail survivor from the tornado with an appropriately horrible backstory. As she is inducted into this movement, we get to experience this new world through her eyes, learning about the way of the Light and the Ladder along with her. A lot of this pilot shows the Meyerists at their best as they try to rebuild and heal Mary, while also sharing all of their respective stories of how the movement has saved them, too. It’s warming stuff, but also behavior that doesn’t want you to let your guard down. Something’s not right.
This first episode also sees Aaron Paul’s Eddie returning back home to the movement after a trip to Peru, where their leader is. Eddie has returned changed, with this epiphany of his fueling much of his behavior. Eddie’s character, as well as his wife, Sarah (Michelle Monaghan), also introduce another deeply interesting aspect to the series, that of raising a family within this Meyerist environment. Eddie and Sarah have several children—most notably, Hawk (a dead ringer for a baby Heath Ledger), a 15 year-old who is about to take his vows—and watching this family negotiate around their rules and beliefs brings forth a lot of pangs of Big Love during its infancy. A particularly unnerving scene sees Sarah reading illustrated bedtime stories about the Ladder to their children. There’s such a history here, with people even being born into it now.
It’s admirable for how much The Path just supplants you into all of this to a certain extent. Terms like “first year novice” are casually thrown around, giving you an indication of just how deep this all runs. It’s a really effective pilot in terms of just putting you into the Meyerist movement and seeing how things operate in their bewildering world. It makes for a very dense first episode, but it’s all engaging stuff. It almost feels Game of Thrones-ish to an extent, but we’re learning about the Ladder instead of Westeros.
Goldberg’s pilot also does a great job at establishing a feeling of paranoia amongst this group, and that you’re always under scrutiny. Even during a sex scene between Eddie and Sarah, the Eye of the Ladder is present and watching over them. It almost feels like a threesome due to its heavy presence in in their relationship. Depicting its weight in this way makes for really strong stuff. There’s also a phenomenal score in play in this show that’s amping up the unnerving factor whenever possible. This stuff is never better than when the show is digging into the negative side of the Ladder, like hinting at what happens to the “Dissenters” that try to leave the movement. Seeing the power vacuum that’s been created here and how people are so willing to use innocent people’s lives as bargaining chips is scary, real stuff.
While it’s still incredibly early on here, both Paul and Dancy still get ample opportunity to shine. Paul already seems to have a strong hold on Eddie, who crushes it in a monologue about his dead brother as well as how he got involved with the Meyerists. Watching Cal coach him through this does a great job at distilling their power dynamic already. While Eddie is all about emotions, Cal feels much more stilted, sociopathic, and intimidating. It’s a little hard to tell at this point if he actually believes what he’s saying, or if he’s just some con artist, but that’s exactly how it should be. He’s bringing forth some Leftovers feels, which is never a bad thing in my book either. The episode also cleverly juxtaposes Cal’s violent side with him simultaneously inspiring people, showing not only the duality within him, but also the movement itself.
The Path’s premiere lays a lot of groundwork and hints at what’s already a deeply engrossing show. Towards the end of things, Cal brings up a poignant anecdote involving Plato’s cave. In this environment people were raised to always look one way in the cave, but when they eventually escaped and saw the true world, they realized that they had just been looking at shadows for all this time. And that these people would rather stone and kill this man who has brought this new world upon them than have their realities destroyed in this monumental way. This pretty much feels like the thesis of the series, as it argues over the pros and cons of living blissfully in ignorance. It raises the incredibly important question of, “What else don’t we know?” and the final images of the episode provide a delightful paradigm shift that very much echoes this sentiment. It feels like The Path is going to be all about sussing out what’s real, what’s fake, and everything in between, and with the lines already being blurred, I can’t wait to see where the rest of this goes.
The Path premieres March 30, airing every Wednesday, exclusively on Hulu.
It’s a day of the month ending in Y, and that means it’s time for another killer shark film. Why? Because they’re inexpensive to make, play into an easy fear, and keep finding audiences willing to give them a spin. The Bay is the latest entry in the shark attack subgenre, and while it’s noticeably better than last month’s Chum, it still struggles to barely stay afloat.
Emma (Francesca Eastwood) and Lani (Dani Oliveros) are best friends who’ve traveled to Thailand for a destination wedding, and a chance encounter at the buffet table leads to an unexpected adventure. Mandal (Alexander Wraith) is a friendly, knowledgeable transplant who connects with nature and makes a living by offering boat tours through the area’s scenic waterways. The trips culminate with the opportunity for tourists to witness a shark feeding with local tiger sharks. The tourists aren’t meant to be the food, obviously, but sometimes accidents happen.
The Bay checks off most of the subgenre’s expected beats – an attractive location, an iffy ensemble of characters, a series of poor choices – but it does a few things differently along the way. For one thing, while we see plenty of sharks in the build-up, the first attack doesn’t happen until past the film’s midpoint. Writer/director Phil Volken fills the time leading up to that attack with engaging enough character beats, some genuine suspense, and an abundance of dialogue about how sharks aren’t typically a threat to people – or threats like people. “Sharks hunt,” says Mandal, “humans kill.”
It’s a bit of foreshadowing, perhaps, but it’s also the film’s presiding theme. Sharks don’t want to hurt or kill humans, but “mistakes happen.” Mandal offers up numerous eco-friendly spiels about the role sharks play in the environment, how overhunting could lead to disaster, and how humans are the ones invading their territory. “Don’t act like prey,” and you won’t be bitten, eaten, digested, and shat out by a shark. Pretty simple, if you think about it.
Trouble starts when they toss a chunk of meat into the water attached to a chain and a large female tiger shark gets caught up in it. Mandal’s sidekick, a local man named Ruhan (Ta’imua), panics and starts stabbing at the thrashing creature. He has a history of being bitten by a shark and is clearly frightened, and as the situation worsens, he becomes a far more active threat to the others’ safety than the actual sharks. That character type is pretty common in these films, but it’s a curious choice to make the film’s sole indigenous member of the ensemble the morally weak link.
To be clear, Ta’imua is playing a local but isn’t actually Thai. He is, however, Hawaiian, and The Bay was filmed off Oahu, meaning he’s the only indigenous representation on both counts. The other three characters, all Americans, are brave and willing to risk their own safety for the group, leaving only Ruhan to put a face to the cruel, selfish humans mentioned earlier in the film. It’s certainly a choice!
His performance is somewhat stifled by the desire to make him seem menacing, but it’s passable. The others are equally okay as performers, but it’s only Oliveros’ Dani who stands apart as a spirited individual worthy of viewer fist pumps. Cinematographer Helge Gerull delivers some attractive landscape shots destined to make you consider a Hawaiian vacation, and composer Gad Emile Zeitune finds some effective aural backdrops for the film’s teasingly emotional moments.
Then there’s the sharks. A major drag on the subgenre these days is the use of cheap CG effects (including the abysmal use of A.I. in Chum), but The Bay sidesteps that problem for the most part. There are real sharks here, lots of them, but they appear to be solely present via stock footage edited into the film. Some CG is used here and there, too, with shots being comped together to tighten the proximity between humans and sharks. Most effective, arguably, are the practical effects used to create fins cutting through the water near the characters.
There’s a sense of grounded reality to the shark kills, and while they’re less showy, they’re weightier as a result. Wounded bodies drift away, and the moment where shark nibbles turn into ferocious feasting feels more inevitable and affecting than sudden or scary. The sole exception to the general quality of those kills is the film’s final shark encounter, which doubles down on the poor choices by pairing a silly CG beat with some poorly matched stock footage.
Pretty much every shark attack movie lives or dies on its presentation of the sharks themselves. There are exceptions, of course, with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws being chief among them – everything about that film, from the writing and acting to the directing and editing, helps make it a masterpiece despite the mechanical shark looking goofy as hell outside of the water – but The Bay isn’t Jaws. It’s not even Jaws: The Revenge. Its live sharks are mildly effective, though, and give it a subdued realism that will likely appeal to viewers averse to CG intrusions. Will that be enough to win them over, though?
“When you enter the ocean, you enter the food chain… and not necessarily at the top,” says an opening onscreen quote from Jacques Cousteau, and something similar could be said for shark attack movies in general. When you make one of these movies, you enter a well-trodden and densely populated subgenre… and you’re all but guaranteed to not be at or even near the top. The Bay is closer to the ocean floor than the water’s surface, and while that still puts it above the bulk of the genre, it’s probably not enough of a reason to step foot in these waters.
The Bay opens in theaters and on demand on July 17, 2026.
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