Unchosen opens with a thunderstorm at a picnic inside the Fellowship of the Divine, and a deaf child named Grace bolts into the woods after mistaking the storm for the Rapture. Rosie breaks Mr Phillips’s order for the women to stay put, finds Grace drowning in a pond, and watches a handsome stranger named Sam pull the child to safety.
What follows in the new Netflix drama is a chain of shocks that keeps tightening the story’s grip, even as the review says the series starts off workmanlike and then goes downhill. Isaac pulls a smartphone from his homemade trousers to call an ambulance, Adam denounces him before the Fellowship for owning what Phillips calls “pipelines of pornography and sewage to our souls,” and Isaac is shunned and locked in a bedroom while his wife Hannah goes into labour and has child number 72. Adam is then made an Elder, a promotion that says plenty about where power sits in the sect.
The Fellowship is a Christian splinter group cut off from the modern world, except for landline phones and electric kettles, and Unchosen uses that narrow line between obedience and exposure to set up its drama. The sect’s rules are rigid, its suspicion of outside life is constant, and the storm scene turns that claustrophobia into something physical, with Grace’s fear and Rosie’s disobedience forcing the group to confront a world it tries to keep at bay.
That pressure only deepens when Sam arrives at Rosie’s door asking for help, saying he has “nowhere to go and no one to turn to,” and later begins to show flashbacks to priests, prison and a fish factory. The review argues that the series wastes the talent of Christopher Eccleston and Siobhan Finneran, which makes the slump matter as much as the setup: Unchosen has the ingredients of a hard-edged cult drama, but the story it promises never quite survives the way it is told.
By the time the dust settles, the question is not whether the Fellowship can hold its members in line; it is whether the series can make the world around them feel as dangerous and alive as the first storm does. On the evidence of this review, it cannot.
