Nine Perfect Strangers might just be the disappointment of the year

Despite an A-list cast including Nicole Kidman and Melissa McCarthy, this wellness drama needs an injection of wit.

Nicole Kidman plays wellness guru Masha in the TV adaptation of Nine Perfect Strangers. Picture: Vince Valitutti/Hulu

Nine Perfect Strangers might just be the disappointment of the year so far, a rather mystifying drama adapted from Big Little Lies author Liane Moriarty’s 2018 novel, and once again shaped by Nicole Kidman who stars. David E. Kelley co-wrote the screenplay with John Henry Butterworth, both Kelley and Kidman are executive producers. (They are but two of 10 listed in the credits; there must have been a lot of notes for the crew to take on board each day!)

All episodes in the series are directed by Jonathan Levine, responsible for the delightful movie Long Shot, that raucous romantic comedy with a sharp political edge starring Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen that was such a crowd pleaser. This is not, unfortunately.

Kidman and Kelley, of course, had already devised two hit shows in Big Little Lies and The Undoing, but their new collaboration seems to be a long way off what they may have originally intended. In fact, more of Kelley’s wit may have redeemed a series which gets off to a rather limp beginning.

Nine Perfect Strangers seems particularly lifeless after the bracing satire and inspired craziness of Mike White’s The White Lotus, another series that looks at the monstrousness of affluence and entitlement, to which it bears some superficial similarities.

The problem with the show might just have been in the choice of Moriarty’s book to adapt to TV. As the respected Kirkus Reviews said of Nine Perfect Strangers, “Fun to read, as always with Moriarty’s books, but try not to think about it or it will stop making sense.” This may be true but there’s no doubting Moriarty’s success.

Once the most successful unknown writer in Australia, Moriarty is the author of seven internationally best-selling novels, including the No.1 New York Times bestsellers The Husband’s Secret, Big Little Lies and Truly Madly Guilty. Her books have been read by more than 20 million people worldwide and translated into 40 languages.

Nine Perfect Strangers arose apparently due to Moriarty’s personal interest in the public’s fascination and perhaps preoccupation with wellness retreats and their aura of spirituality, and a kind of obsessive need many of us have in learning to be more efficient, more focused, more effective in the pursuit of happiness.

She says she was influenced by a book she read in Hawaii, a 1930s novel. “The sort of book my grandmother used to have — very British — and it was a murder mystery about a novelist who goes to a school for gymnasts,” she told the New York Times. “And what I loved about it was that experience of going somewhere new and learning all the procedures, of like what time breakfast is; that’s what I really enjoyed about it. I was excited about creating the rules of my place.”

And like the novel, the series follows a group of, well, not all really perfect strangers, but people from assorted wealthyish backgrounds to the gorgeous Tranquillum House for a wellness retreat in lush Napa Valley-like surroundings. A sign at the start tells us we are in Cabrillo, California. “You’ve Come A Long Way” it tells newcomers.

The show was shot among the lush greenery and fig trees of Byron Bay during the early months of the pandemic, with film and TV production classified an essential service. Production designer Colin Gibson and set decorator Glen W. Johnson found buildings of concrete and glass with light wood accents at the wellness retreat Soma in the hinterland, and a nearby sustainable timber plantation, Lune de Sang, owned by a mining executive turned glass artist.

In the series the 10-day retreat in these gorgeous surroundings promises to transform the lives of the characters, though they have little idea of the psychodramas and emotional confrontations that await them.

And they quickly discover there’s more than simple relaxation in store as their phones are confiscated, along with stashed wine and junk food. “Perfect” they are not, all the characters suffer various levels of pain and emotional distress, something the resort leader, the exotic Russian Masha Dmitrichenko (played by Kidman), is, it turns out, determined to exploit for her own nefarious purposes. (“The rumour is she mixes and matches her guests like a cocktail,” one of them later reveals to the others.)

The game is almost given away by the title’s sequence of psychedelic shots of opening tropical flowers, sunsets and waves crashing that segues into an almost pornographic close shot of a mixer slowly tumbling tropical fruit, the blades increasing in speed and turning the fruit to bloody sludge, a highly disturbing image.

What follows is a kind of Agatha Christie-like sequence which introduces us to the characters as they gather at Tranquillum House. And there is a sense of the classical mystery convention as the series unfolds – we are presented with an array of characters, or clues to characters and a bunch of possible suspects possibly about to be involved in some mystery or other.

There’s Melissa McCarthy’s Frances Welty, a one-time best-selling romance novelist who receives word as she drives to the retreat that her publisher wants to buy her out of her contract, given her recent lack of success. Her personal life is a disaster too, her latest boyfriend having scammed her, but at least she says she enjoys her “quiet moments of despair”. Asked why she’s at Tranquillum House she says, “My career is over sort of thing, a bit of menopause, a bad relationship and a dose of crippling shame.”

There’s younger couple Jessica (Samara Weaving), a social media influencer and her husband Ben (Melvin Gregg) driving an expensive sports car. They have marital problems and are attending “to work on ourselves’’. Jessica is also worried the retreat is not on social media, which is “super mysterious’’. Carmel (Regina Hall) appears reasonably well-adjusted, and just wants to lose some weight, get over her divorce, and become a better person.

The Marconis — the “overly loquacious” and loudly compensating schoolteacher Napoleon (Michael Shannon), his dour wife, Heather (Asher Keddie) and daughter, Zoe (Grace Van Patten) – hope to find a way to finally cope with the death of Zoe’s twin brother a year before.

Tony Hogburn (Bobby Cannavale), truculent, combative and sullen, seems to be a former sports star, unable to find a life after fame. And Lars Lee (Luke Evans) is a handsome narcissistic “wellness addict” who has just lost his boyfriend and doesn’t expect much from Tranquillum House. “It’s just another construct to separate rich people from the money and feel good about themselves in the process,” he tells the others. “Such utter crap.”

Carmel is worried about the group vibe from the start: “Too many cases in the basket.”

Kidman’s Masha adds another case when she appears – she spends a lot of time surveilling her guests through omnipresent cameras that cover the retreat – and addresses the group for the first time. “You have all come here to die,” she tells her already fretting guests. “I will bring you back.” She reveals that she herself once died in a previous life when she was some sort of successful CEO, shot dead in a parking garage. This sequence is wonderfully over the top, as is Kidman’s performance. It’s bizarre in fact, completely out of kilter with the other portrayals, and they provide a mixed bunch too, acting styles ranging from the noir thriller, to the sitcom and the toothpaste commercial. Kidman, as always these days, is unlined, her face a blank screen. She wears a waist-long, ice-blonde wig – Masha is described earlier by Frances as a “mystical Eastern-Bloc unicorn” and Kidman’s accent veers alarmingly towards vaudeville.

This is despite Kidman revealing during a publicity call that she had stayed in character throughout the five months of filming, jokingly calling herself “batshit crazy”. She says she would only respond to her character’s name, ignoring anyone who called her “Nicole” or talked to her out of character. Well, as actors like to say, whatever works, works.

Thankfully, McCarthy saves the day with a lovely comic performance with her endearingly flighty character, self-aware and self-mocking – a delight. Somehow she manages to make inadequacy, failure, anguish, insecurity, sadness and desperation amusing. She steals every scene in which she appears.

Another let-down is Levine’s somewhat tepid direction. In the Undoing, Susanne Bier gave us a highly cinematic eight hours of domestic noir and in the earlier Big Little Lies, Jean-Marc Vallee developed a kind of hall of mirrors storytelling style where the evolving narrative is reflected in the filmmaking process. Scenes sometimes seem to overlap slightly, merging for moments, bringing meaning from one to another. But here Jonathan Levine adds little to the soapiness of the tale, despite some coolly elegant compositions from cinematographer Yves Belanger, who also shot Big Little Lies.

Disappointing indeed.

Nine Perfect Strangers is streaming on Amazon Prime.