![]() Instead, everything we’ve come to understand about this woman-and we understand more about her than I ever expected to understand-seems to suggest that she genuinely believes she’s helping the people who come to stay with her at Tranquillum House, and may in fact be helping many of them for real. Nor does she seem to be a sociopath, or to be primarily driven by fueling a sense of power over those who submit themselves to her ministrations. We come to understand throughout the show that her treatment has even proved deadly in the past for at least one guest who is implied to have experienced a medical emergency in the course of his stay, almost certainly because of the steady stream of drugs she feeds all her patients. She’s flawed, yes-deeply so-and her questionable methods of therapy and pharmacology are often both arrogant and profoundly irresponsible. The archetype for Masha’s character seems to demand a secret sociopath, a sadist who built this “wellness” retreat as a way to not only be able to abuse people at her leisure, but be paid to do so.Īnd yet … that’s not really Masha in Nine Perfect Strangers. One looks at the setup for Nine Perfect Strangers and expects it to be a story about nine vulnerable people being taken advantage of by a woman who exults in expanding her power over them, effectively dominating their lives, as they learn to resist her machinations. In any conventional story occurring in this particular setting, this would be all you’d need-Masha would be our primary antagonist by default. She has exactly the sort of ethereal, mysterious presence you would expect this character to have-aloof, exotic, beguiling, the kind of woman who invariably gets what she wants, and convinces you that it was your idea all along. Masha is the New Age queen at the center of the absurdly named Tranquillum House, the exclusive health and wellness resort in which our “strangers” all find themselves currently expanding their consciousness under the influence of a variety of mind-altering drugs. And in the end, it all comes down to how this story has treated Nicole Kidman’s Masha Dmitrichenko. ![]() ![]() This show simply doesn’t have a traditional “villain”-at least not yet-and the resulting uncertainty this has generated is making each episode that much better as the audience waits for a payoff to the gathering tension. ![]() But when it comes to the presentation of antagonistic influences, Nine Perfect Strangers veers far from the trope-laden path I now realize I was unconsciously expecting. And indeed, all those themes are present, and the cast is just as good as advertised, with spellbinding turns from the likes of Michael Shannon, Bobby Canavale, Regina Hall and Melissa McCarthy. On first inspection, and throughout its initial marketing materials and trailers, Nine Perfect Strangers looked like it might be more than a little familiar-a TV prestige drama that leans entirely on the quality of its stacked cast in order to tell a conventional story about power, control, victimhood, coercion and predation, in a setting that conjures up comparisons to every drama or docuseries about cults you’ve seen before. And that’s exactly what has been happening to me for the last few weeks as I continue to be drawn further into weekly episodes of Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers. It does, however, occasionally make for a different kind of enjoyable experience, when you’re forced to officially dump your expectations by the wayside by a show that continuously befuddles you. This kind of genre literacy is helpful for examining the TV or film landscape in a broader way, but it can simultaneously suck the simple pleasures out of the evening ritual of hunkering down with a new favorite show. The longer a person has been doing this, in fact, the more dismissive they may very well be toward new movies or shows that look at all familiar or derivative-it just gets harder and harder over time to summon up the enthusiasm to watch hours of similar programming when you feel like you inevitably have a sense of how it’s all going to turn out. The cast of Nine Perfect Strangers is led by Nicole Kidman as Masha Dmitrichenko, a wellness guru and host of Tranquillum House.If you know many TV and film writers, you’re probably aware that they can be a cynical bunch. "Some doors are meant to stay closed," Bobby Cannavale warns. As the group members arrive, their inner struggles begin to surface. ![]() They are welcomed to Tranquillum House by an extremely pale, spooky-looking Nicole Kidman. The Nine Perfect Strangers trailer begins with flashes of the titular people who are "in need of some fixing," as Melissa McCarthy puts it. New episodes will be available two days after their Hulu premiere. International viewers can watch Nine Perfect Strangers online via Amazon Prime Video, starting Friday, August 20. View Deal How to watch Nine Perfect Strangers in the UK, Canada and Australia ![]()
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