Neasa Hardiman’s emphasis on performance appeals to us; her handling of place is less convincing in UNTAMED. The wilderness holds our attention, but too little of the mystery feels shaped by it.
Fi1m perspective
The Yosemite wilderness in UNTAMED (2025) holds our attention even when the investigation does not. Cinematographer Michael McDonough gives the landscape a scale that the police drama struggles to match. For a series with such a distinctive setting, too many scenes could happen somewhere else. We were frustrated by the mismatch: the views kept renewing our interest, then the familiar detours in the case wore it down.
Hardiman’s work has often favoured female-led stories and close attention to performance, across crime, science fiction and period drama. Her British television work includes Happy Valley (2016), followed by American productions such as Jessica Jones (2018). With Sea Fever (2019), her first feature as writer-director, she made a science-fiction thriller concerned with trust and interdependence. That step into writing matters when considering her work: it gives us a film whose story choices are hers, alongside the shared directing credit on UNTAMED.
Her stated interest in acting is specific: performers concentrating on one another, with the possibility that an emotional exchange might go somewhere unexpected. We welcome that priority, particularly in a crime drama, where following the clues can leave little room for noticing the people. In UNTAMED, Eric Bana and Lily Santiago make an engaging investigative pair, and their company gives the series something worth staying with. But their appeal does not make the forced turns of the mystery any more convincing, or remove our wish for police work more particular to this place.
Hardiman directed two episodes of UNTAMED, sharing directing duties on the series with Thomas Bezucha and Nick Murphy. It would be careless to turn a weakness shared across the programme into a settled judgement on one director. Todd Fjelsted’s production design gives the police work a credible setting, yet the directors do not consistently make that setting a source of suspense; the attractive surroundings cannot do that job unaided. Anyone coming to UNTAMED for a tightly worked mystery should lower their expectations.
Biography
Neasa Hardiman is an Irish director and screenwriter. She holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin and began her career producing and directing programmes for the RTÉ network in Ireland, including becoming the youngest director of the soap opera Fair City in 1998.
Hardiman is known for her television work on series including Tracy Beaker Returns (2010–2012), Scott & Bailey (2014), Happy Valley (2016), Z: The Beginning of Everything (2017), Inhumans (2017), Jessica Jones (2018–2019), Hit & Run (2021), We Were the Lucky Ones (2024) and Untamed (2025). Her feature film debut Sea Fever (2019), which she also wrote, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. She has won BAFTA awards.
