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Before her most recent role as Cassandra Lang in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Kathryn Newton has had a long career starring in both lead and supporting roles in film and television. With small roles in the Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, Lady Bird, and Big Little Lies, and lead roles in films like Detective Pikachu and The Map of Tiny Perfect Things. But her most impressive performance was her short-lived role as Allie Pressman in The Society, a Netflix original series that was canceled after its first season as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
What is ‘The Society’ about?
Inspired by Lord of the Flies and the tale of the Pied Piper, The Society follows a group of high school students from the small but wealthy fictional town of West Ham, Connecticut. In the first episode, a mysterious, putrid smell plagues the community, and a message appears spray-painted on the outside wall of the church, “mene mene tekel upharsin”, a Hebrew phrase from the Book of Daniel, which translates to “you’ve been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” This is where “the writing on the wall” idiom comes from, and for the students of West Ham, it is, literally and metaphorically.
While the smell lingers, every West Ham High School student above the age of 16 is sent on a field trip to the Smoky Mountains for a week of camping. While all the students are asleep on the bus, they are unknowingly forced to turn around and go back home due to a severe thunderstorm. As soon as they wake up, the bus drivers drop them off outside the school in the dark and drive away. But the town is eerily quiet and entirely empty — parents, siblings, teachers — have all disappeared, and the returning students have lost phone service, Internet, and any connection to the outside world. They soon discover that this version of West Ham is surrounded by a seemingly impenetrable forest, leaving them forced to fend for themselves and figure out what happened to them.
Allie Becomes West Ham’s Reluctant New Leader
Luckily for Allie and the rest of the West Ham students, her older sister Cassandra (Rachel Keller), steps up as the leader and devises a plan for the town to work together to survive by sharing houses, eating communally, and alternating necessary tasks on a weekly schedule. After the boys ransack the town, Cassandra urges the girls to stick together while a group of the boys discusses their issues with Cassandra’s leadership in a way that reeks of misogyny. At the end of Episode 3, Cassandra is shot and killed, and their community promptly descends into chaos.
After her sister’s funeral, kids start abandoning the work schedule and begin to arm themselves with their parents’ guns, leaving West Ham in a brief state of anarchy before Allie’s friends all but force her to take over from Cassandra as the town leader, which the students accept (at first). Having lived in her older sister’s shadow for her entire life, Allie is unprepared for this demanding new role, while still grieving her sister and hunting for her killer. Trying to keep things under control in an increasingly volatile environment with new problems cropping up every day, Allie makes a number of bold, sometimes morally questionable decisions to keep their new society from falling apart at the seams.
Despite initially being renewed for a second season, The Society was eventually canceled due to cost and scheduling issues brought upon by the COVID-19 pandemic, so unfortunately this thought-provoking reimagining of Lord of the Flies was cut short with several loose ends. In a show with over a dozen side characters, Allie remains the focal point of the series, and Newton’s performance solidifies her as a compelling, morally gray character. Bolstered by some other standout performances from Olivia DeJonge, Toby Wallace, and Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Newton does an excellent job of portraying the array of emotions Allie is experiencing at every point in the series. Pushed into an unwanted leadership position, Allie tries to put on a brave face and channel some of her late sister’s composure, but every so often her petrified inner child peeks through in Newton’s expressive eyes.
Newton replacing Emma Fuhrmann as Cassie Lang was a controversial move, and her performance in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has been somewhat divisive among fans, but she is definitely an actress worth watching in other projects, like her more recent lead roles in The Society and the 2020 comedy slasher Freaky. Another victim of Netflix’s propensity to cancel their original shows after just one season, Newton was unfortunately robbed of the chance to develop Allie’s character even further in a Season 2.
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