Yaga review – this erotic witchy thriller starring Hudson Williams is a total head-messer

The Heated Rivalry actor plays two people in this genre-bending mystery. And Carrie-Anne Moss is fantastic as a horny author – who might have supernatural powers

Well, here’s an unexpected answer to the question of what Hudson Williams did next: the overnight megastar created by the smash-hit success of Heated Rivalry (hot young men bang each other for seven episodes, emotional connection also glossed, intermittent hockey scenes) appears as two characters in the spooky thriller Yaga.

Williams plays Henry Park, the missing scion of a powerfully rich family in the spooky Canadian coastal town of Whittock, and Henry’s spookily looky-likey roommate Logan, who lives in the Parks’ staffed mansion rent-free in return for helping Henry with his podcasts, parties and possible bisexuality. There is a lot of all three about these days among the young, I’m told. Usually by their podcasts.

Private investigator and family employee-friend Charlie Rapp (Noah Reid) is sent by Henry’s parents, who are now visiting Japan, as Henry has a history of disappearing on jaunts abroad. Rapp, intended to be cocky yet charming, joins forces with by-the-book beat cop Carson (Clark Backo), whom he soon deduces may be a lesbian – because this is a reworking, by Canadian playwright Kat Sadler, of the misogyny-suffused Slavic legend about Baba Yaga, a misunderstood, baby-eating devil woman, and you can’t really do that without at least a dash of Sapphism in the mix. Off they go to find a way to work together despite their very different lives, temperaments, approaches to the job and abilities to dress for coastal Canadian weather.

Soon they are amassing clues, suspects and folk-horror mainstays in roughly equal proportions. Henry’s passport, laptop, fancy watch and $15,000 (£11,000) are gone but he left his beloved camera behind. Also a narked ex-girlfriend, Pam (Ezra Franky), which is still apparently a viable name in British Columbia, who – along with other townswomen – emerges as a force to be reckoned with. She is not bothered by Henry’s missingness. “Shitty guys should be dead,” she says. I like a girl who knows where she stands.

They meet Carrie-Anne Moss (the show’s executive producer) as uber-mysterious, super-charismatic, fantastically old (“I’m 60”) professor Katherine, who specialises in bones. She has written a book called Sexy Bones, because Yaga is a series in which – just as things are beginning to hang together – something like this occurs to make your suspension of disbelief just that bit less willing. (See also Rapp’s success with the laydeez of Whittock – as instant and incessant as it is inexplicable, given his mindless bro energy. I would remind you that Canada is the birthplace of Ryans both Gosling and Reynolds. It is not an underinformed or undersupplied country.) Even at her advanced age, the professor is still sexually active. With younger men! It seems impossible that she can be doing this without witchcraft, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Dead and bloodied birds become a recurring motif. The investigating duo find chicken feet in Henry’s and his doppelganger’s rooms. Mysterious symbols abound. There’s a secret passageway and blood spots in the breakfast eggs they are served at the local diner. There’s a druggy party at the mansion and a variety of chemically induced visions for Rapp. Every episode opens with a guttural voiceover from a Slavic-accented woman saying things like: “A witch isn’t born. She begins.” There is a lot of mist and there are a lot of trees and a lot of nightmares where people have spiders come out of their mouths and wake with a start.

Then a castrated body turns up on the beach (and I am awarding bonus points for whoever managed to get the penis stump scene past the censors – I think it is a first, though I suspect we are all in no hurry for a second) and things become a bit more police-procedural than spooky, and although fans of the supernatural vibe will be sorry, it does improve the flow, narratively speaking.

The story becomes stronger and more timely as the malevolent vibe that the town carries is revealed (though still a bit too slowly), and the feminist twist on the legend gets to work. What has up until now been a solid three-star outing starts edging towards a four, and I’m going to round up and award it the latter.

Yaga is such a quirky, hit-and-miss endeavour, so dependent on individual taste and the amount of goodwill in the room at any given moment that everyone should give it a shot. It’s got something – I just can’t say precisely what. Baba, of course, may be messing with my head.