Netflix’s Unchosen opens inside a closed Christian splinter sect and ends up, in the view of, going downhill after a workmanlike start. The drama is set among the Fellowship of the Divine, where outsiders are called the unchosen and nearly all technology is banned.
Christopher Eccleston plays Mr Phillips, the sect’s leader, while Siobhan Finneran is also in the cast. The Fellowship keeps landline phones and electric kettles but bars anything beyond that, drawing a hard line between its members and the world outside. That split drives the series from the start, and it is the reason the review treats the show less as a mystery than as a portrait of a sealed system.
The first jolting turn comes during a picnic when a thunderstorm breaks over the sect. Grace, a deaf child, mistakes the noise for the Rapture and runs into the woods. Rosie disobeys Mr Phillips’s order for the women to stay put and finds Grace drowning in a pond or small lake. A handsome stranger named Sam, played by Fra Fee, jumps in and saves her, and Grace then needs an ambulance.
What follows is the kind of detail that makes the world feel both rigid and brittle. Isaac pulls a smartphone from his homemade trousers and uses it to call for help, only for Adam to publicly denounce his brother for owning a pipeline to pornography. Isaac is shunned and locked in a bedroom while his wife Hannah goes into labour and has child number 72. Adam, for his loyalty to the Fellowship, is rewarded by being made an Elder.
The show’s friction is that the sect’s language of purity keeps colliding with ordinary human need. Mr Phillips warns against the “evil modern world” of the unchosen and rails against “pipelines of pornography and sewage to our souls,” yet the community still reaches for a smartphone the moment an ambulance is needed. The Fellowship can forbid the outside world, but it cannot keep it from arriving when a child is drowning or a woman is in labour.
Sam does not disappear after the rescue. He comes to Rosie’s door, says, “my name is Sam,” and says he has nowhere to go and no one to turn to. He tells her he got a wound rescuing Grace, is parked in the chicken coop overnight, and soon starts to get flashbacks to priests, prison and a fish factory. Rosie, meanwhile, has increasingly vivid fantasies about him, pushing the story toward a more unsettled register than the sect’s stern rules can contain.
That is where Unchosen seems to lose its footing. The setup is plain enough and the cast, which also includes Asa Butterfield, Molly Windsor, Aston McAuley, Alexa Davies and Olivia Pickering, gives the series plenty to work with. But the review’s verdict is that once the drama leaves its disciplined opening and starts piling on revelations, it goes downhill. The answer to the headline question is yes: this is a cult drama with a striking premise, but according to the review it does not keep the promise it makes at the start.