Netflix’s new crime thriller is the best of 2025 so far for one key reason

Netflix’s new drama Untamed wastes no time with boring throat-clearing up top. Time is of the essence: we only have six episodes to piece together who killed the young woman we see tumble off a cliff in the very first scene.

Set in the vast expanse of Yosemite National Park (at least in the B-roll, the show was filmed in British Columbia), we zoom in to the hulking granite monolith El Capitan. A couple of climbing aficionados are trying to scale the thing.

The sheer rockface has claimed over 30 lives, including seasoned climbers, and is about to add another victim to the tally when an unidentified woman falls down into the climbers’ tangle of ropes, belays and carabiners. It’s a stomach-snatching opener.

The park rangers who respond on the scene are quickly usurped by the grizzled gunslinger Kyle Turner (Eric Bana), a parks special agent who strolls in on a horse (‘Here comes Gary Cooper’) to tell them they’re all doing their jobs wrong.

Among the lowly ranger class is Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago, providing welcome light relief), a newcomer from the Los Angeles force who’s taking endless slack for it. Despite an aversion to horse-riding and a naivety about the park, she finagles her way onto the Jane Doe case with Turner.

Turner’s boss Paul Souter (Sam Neill) and everyone else in the department is keen to write the death off as a suicide. But Turner suspects there’s more to it. None-spoilery-spoiler: he’s right.

Created by Elle Smith and Mark L Smith (The Revenant scribe, so no stranger to conjuring an unforgiving setting), Untamed at first glance looks like another bog-standard police procedural. 

But what puts it head and shoulders above any of the crime thrillers Netflix has offered up so far this year – and more in the leagues of Broadchurch or Mare of Easttown – is the inventive setting, with a cast singing in perfect harmony.

World-weariness and – we later discover, although clues are there from the start – family tragedy show in Turner’s every interaction. He barely smiles. He often doesn’t reply to people. He lives in a cabin teeming with packing boxes, unclear whether he’s coming or going (it certainly does not have that box-fresh look a lot of Netflix homes do).

He has a habit of calling his ex-wife Jill (Rosemarie DeWitt) at 2.30am to muse over the tatters of their once-happy lives. He’s the quintessential difficult detective and it’s some of Bana’s best work. You completely forget this is Prince Hector, the Hulk or King Henry VIII. This is Kyle Turner and he’s going through it.

It’s no easy task he’s up against. Trying to enforce the rule of law on this wilderness is a fool’s errand. Turner lays it out pretty succinctly himself: ‘This park’s the size of Rhode Island. It’s got five separate highway entrances, bringing in over 100,000 people a week.’

This is a place where CCTV is thin on the ground and the forensic experts called in are the type who specialise in vultures that pick over human remains (which happens to more than one person). Traversing this colossal haystack to find the slightest of clues can only be done on horseback or by chopper.

At a distance, the park looks desolate. But amongst the trees, waterfalls and deer-filled meadows are pockets of civilisation that Turner and Vasquez brush up against, as they try to figure out who the dead woman was and, later, who killed her.

Everything and everyone is real. And most of them are suspects. Because for all its beauty, the park invites a frightening lawlessness. ‘Something about putting people in the wilderness – they figure nobody’s watching, so they do whatever bad stuff pops in their head,’ says ranger Bruce Milch (William Smillie, with more light relief), explaining the deaths and disappearances that happen with alarming regularity.

As the twists and turns take shape, bringing into question unsolved cases from years gone by, Untamed becomes a show you will struggle to look away from. You will gasp. You will sweat. And you’ll come away wishing there might have been more throat-clearing up top after all. 

Untamed is available to stream on Netflix.

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