Undefeated by tragedy, Napoleon is an everydad in white socks and sneakers who describes his breakfast as a “big yum-yum” and his surly fellow retreaters as “the Bickersons.” He seems uniquely irritating to the rest of his group, including Melissa McCarthy as Frances, a depressed romance novelist Regina Hall as Carmel, a schlubby divorcée and Bobby Cannavale as Tony, a self-described “run-of-the-mill asshole” in more pain than he lets on. Michael Shannon plays Napoleon Marconi, the Ned Flanders–esque patriarch of a grieving family, with Asher Keddie as his near-catatonic wife and Grace Van Patten as their daughter. The cast, helpfully, is a veritable gift basket of goodies. As with Big Little Lies, Kelley seems to have profound sympathy for his wounded, privileged characters, and deftly fetishizes the luxury of their surroundings without undermining their sadness. The topic of wellness has never been more urgent, more fraught, or more subject to exploitation by unscrupulous “healers.” But the show doesn’t seem to know what it wants to say about it. Read: The awful secret of wealth privilege There is definitely something a bit off about the smoothies. There are sweat lodges and hot springs and trust exercises and primal screaming. Nicole Kidman’s Masha, a cursed Barbie doll in a diaphanous wig and last year’s prairie dresses, blinks furiously as she presides over the ritualistic excavation of people’s pain. In Nine Perfect Strangers, some varyingly troubled individuals arrive at a California retreat led by a spiritual healer whose intentions are as spotty as her Russian accent. The 201 7 Gore Verbinski cult film A Cure for Wellness imagined an overworked Wall Streeter going missing at a mysterious Swiss health resort plagued by secrets and lots and lots of eels. The recent HBO show The White Lotus took a ruthlessly sociological approach to the model, skewering the toxic privilege of a group of vacationers in Hawaii like sharks in a barrel. Nine Perfect Strangers is an entry in the emerging genre of wellness horror, in which a group of wealthy, miserable people who are paying silly amounts of money to feel better about themselves ends up instead in a spa-weekend version of Dante’s Inferno. What your blender does for a farmers’-market haul, Kelley and his co-creator, John-Henry Butterworth, have managed for genres: The series, as it cycles through satire, horror, and prestige psychodrama, can’t quite decide whether the wellness industry is a virulent scam or a desperately needed curative for broken souls. Like HBO’s Big Little Lies, the show is adapted from a novel by Liane Moriarty, and its setup-a self-help and wellness retreat goes very wrong-seems irresistible. Kelley’s new miniseries on Hulu, is an image of fruit being pulverized into gloop, which is also how my brain felt after watching the first six episodes.
The defining motif of Nine Perfect Strangers, David E.
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