The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
‘NINE PERFECT STRANGERS’
Nicole Kidman, Michael Shannon among big names in Hulu series that seduces you with its mystery
“Nine Perfect Strangers” begins with an overhead shot of a smoothie being made. Its various fresh ingredients are being tossed together — and sliced up and pureed — in a way that hints at what’s to come for the characters in this intriguing Hulu drama series.
After all, the various components of this soonto-be drink are about as appealing as the impressive cast of this adaptation of the 2018 novel of the same name by Liane Moriarty. Headlined by Nicole Kidman, “Nine Perfect Strangers” also boasts Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon, Regina Hall, Luke Evans and Bobby Cannavale, as well as a handful of less prominent but nonetheless impactful players such as Samara Weaving, Asher Keddie, Grace Van Patten and Manny Jacinto.
Well, based on a viewing of the first six installments in this eight-episode hourlong drama, the characters do get figuratively chopped and blended together by Kidman’s mysterious wellness guru, Masha — all while she has reason to worry about someone literally cutting into her.
And the first threefourths of this series are a highly entertaining if increasingly wobbly ride. Think of a massage that’s a little rough in spots but has you feeling better all the same.
“Nine Perfect Strangers” starts very strong with
its first chapter, “Random Acts of Mayhem,” dropping Aug. 18 along with the second and third episodes. It has plenty of heavy lifting to do in introducing us to the various characters,
all of whom — aside from Masha and her skeleton staff — are traveling to her highly regarded if also gossiped-about Tranquillum House.
“Chronically loquacious”
Marconi family patriarch Napoleon (Shannon) exudes excitement and optimism about the week ahead that isn’t quite matched by his wife, Heather (Keddie), and daughter, Zoe (Van Patten, “The Meyerowitz Stories”). They are dealing with something heavy you will learn about sooner than later.
Elsewhere en route, once highly regarded romance novelist Frances Welty (McCarthy) has a run-in with the likewise struggling Tony Hogburn (Cannavale). Theirs is the kind of tension that will be shared by others at Tranquillum, such as Lars Lee (Evans, “Furious 7”) and Carmel Schneider (Hall, “Girls Trip”). She has been devastated by losing the man in her life — and she will clash with more than Lars while at Tranquillum — and he clearly has a secret agenda and isn’t afraid of ruffling feathers.
The remaining key players are young, wealthy married couple Ben (Melvin Gregg, “High Flying Bird”) and Jessica (Weaving, “Ready or Not”) Chandler — she’s a beautiful chronic Instagrammer who tries to vlog while he worries about his Lamborghini on a bumpy road — and Masha’s romantically involved lieutenants, Yao (Jacinto) and Delilah (Tiffany Boone, “Hunters”).
Upon arrival, a few of the nine guests resist to having their phones taken, along with any booze and pills they hoped they could hide in their rooms, as well as having their blood drawn.
When they meet the exotic Masha, she tells them of her backstory — or at least a version of it — which involves coming to the United States from Russia, climbing the corporate ladder to great heights and being shot in a parking garage. She was literally brought back to life by then-first responder Yao, she says, and she will do something similar for them.
“You have all come here to die; I will bring you back,” Masha says. “There can be birth in death.”
However metaphorical it may be, this death doesn’t sound so great to most guests, and Masha has plenty of convincing to do.
As “Nine Perfect Strangers” progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent this is no ordinary group — Delilah worries the vibe is especially “charged” and that Masha should tread more carefully than she is — and that Masha needs every one of them to stay at Tranquillum and to give in to her to a certain degree.
At the same time, Masha is getting threatening texts from an unknown sender. She has reason to believe the messages are from someone on the premises, be it a guest or staffer.
Filmed during the novel coronavirus pandemic late last year in Australia, “Nine Perfect Strangers” gives off this energy that the people involved with making it were happy to be doing it.
There’s certainly some familiarity among some of them.
This is the third show, following HBO projects “Big Little Lies” and “The Undoing,” created by veteran TV producer David E. Kelley (“L.A. Law,” “Ally McBeal”) in which Kidman has acted. (“Nine Perfect Strangers” was cocreated by John Henry Butterworth, who along with Samantha Strauss and Jonathan Levine, share writing credits with Kelley on various episodes.)
And you can’t help but notice hugely successful big-screen comedienne McCarthy and Cannavale are sharing a lot of screen time again, following movies “Spy” (2015), “Superintelligence” (2020) and “Thunder Force” (2021). As their characters evolve, their scenes together become one of the selling points of “Nine Perfect Strangers,” and the same can be said of Cannavale’s performance alone.
The work of Shannon
(“Take Shelter”) also is expectedly laudable, while Kidman’s is a mixed bag. Her accent always sounds like a work in progress, but she gives off the largerthan-life presence her character must possess for the series to work.
(We also have to mention it’s enjoyable to see Jacinto — a constant joy as drug dealer and Jacksonville Jaguars superfan Jason Mendoza on NBC series “The Good Place” — portray a vastly different character.)
Every episode of “Nine Perfect Strangers” is directed by Levine (“50/50,” “Long Shot”), and he is able to keep the viewer invested
in the show’s mysteries even after questions are answered, at least partially.
Although it feels as if, given the story being told, the series would have been tighter with a total of six episodes instead of eight — it begins to lose a bit of momentum with the fourth episode, “Brave New World” — viewing the final two may cause that opinion to become outdated.
While perhaps not quite as delicious as that aforementioned smoothie looks, “Nine Perfect Strangers” does go down quite easily, a late-summer treat to fortify us until all of autumn’s entertainment arrives.