Dangerous therapy

TV Se­ries

The prece­dent for the col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween Nicole Kid­man and pro­ducer David E. Kel­ley in the ad­dic­tive Big Lit­tle Lies set the bar very high, but fans who might be hop­ing for a sim­i­lar re­sult might be a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed by Nine Per­fect Strangers. This new eight-chap­ter minis­eries star­ring the Aus­tralian ac­tress is based on the best­seller with the same title by writer Liane Mo­ri­arty (who also wrote Big Lit­tle Lies). It deals with the ex­pe­ri­ence of nine guests who are stay­ing in an ex­clu­sive rest and well­ness cen­tre called Tran­quil­lum House. There they dis­cover that the ther­a­pies to which they are sub­jected are very dif­fer­ent from what they had ex­pected.

The se­ries has some sus­pense and a lot of melo­drama, but un­like the plot of Big Lit­tle Lies it is not par­tic­u­larly be­liev­able. What’s more, Nicole Kid­man’s per­for­mance can hardly be de­scribed as her best to date, while her long wig and over-the-top Russ­ian ac­cent does not help the sit­u­a­tion ei­ther. Kid­man plays the mys­te­ri­ous Masha, the head of the cen­tre and a woman with a com­pli­cated past as an ex­ec­u­tive who de­cided to change her life and cre­ate the lux­u­ri­ous ther­a­peu­tic well­ness cen­tre to help her guests over­come stress through un­con­ven­tional means, such as the use of hyp­no­sis and hal­lu­cino­genic sub­stances.

The guests (the strangers of the title), have in com­mon the fact that they do not feel at ease with their own lives. On the one hand, there are the three mem­bers of the Mar­coni fam­ily, the par­ents and a daugh­ter, who can’t over­come the sui­cide of a rel­a­tive. The fa­ther, played mas­ter­fully by Michael Shan­non, is the one who be­lieves more than the oth­ers that the stay in Traquil­lum can help them. The rest of the guests are Jes­sica and Ben, a young rich cou­ple who have seen how money can­not solve the ups and downs of their re­la­tion­ship; the house­wife Carmel, who is trau­ma­tised by her hus­band’s in­fi­delity and di­vorce; Lars, a jour­nal­ist, who is the only one of the guests who sus­pects there is some­thing wrong with Tran­quil­lum; Frances, a suc­cess­ful writer with self-es­teem prob­lems and quite an awk­ward life, and fi­nally Tony, a for­mer Amer­i­can foot­ball star who lost it all when he got in­jured and who has be­come ever more cyn­i­cal over the years. It is the re­la­tion­ship that forms be­tween Frances, played by the hi­lar­i­ous Melissa Mc­Carthy, and Tony, played by the great Bobby Can­navale, which is one of the rea­sons why it is worth watch­ing the se­ries.

As the story pro­gresses, we dis­cover dif­fer­ent as­pects of the guests’ per­son­al­i­ties, but also about Masha and the as­sis­tants of the cen­tre, which works al­most like a sect. Cu­ri­ous ties are also es­tab­lished be­tween them, some­times al­liances, some­times ri­val­ries, while shar­ing ex­pe­ri­ences and trau­matic mem­o­ries that have marked their lives. And as the re­la­tion­ships de­velop, the ex­pe­ri­ence of re­lax­ation, well-being and vital re­newal that has been promised to the guests turns into some­thing of a night­mare. In fact, there comes a point when the guests, who had to hand over their mo­bile phones when they ar­rived at the cen­tre, are com­pletely iso­lated and begin to sus­pect that their lives may even be in dan­ger.