‘Nine Perfect Strangers’ gives boost to psychedelic therapy
Midway through Hulu’s limited series “Nine Perfect Strangers,” created by David E. Kelley, the guests at a luxurious wellness retreat on a remote stretch of the California coast realize that their host, Masha (Nicole Kidman), has been drugging them with psychedelics. They’re initially upset: They hadn’t given consent for this.
But none of them leaves. While a form of psychedelic-assisted therapy is depicted throughout the series, based on the novel by Liane Moriarty (“Big Little Lies”), the show takes a lot of liberties. Masha is ignoring oodles of ethics, probably doesn’t even have a therapy license and is definitely breaking the law. Yet she has an unerring belief that she can make her guests well again using her protocol.
“Nine Perfect Strangers” director Jonathan Levine shares Masha’s belief: Psychedelic therapy “is one of my top five options for the salvation of humanity,” he says. In order to immerse himself in the topic prior to filming the series, Levine read “How to Change Your Mind,” Michael Pollan’s seminal book on psychedelic-assisted therapy, and consulted with a leader of a retreat for the use of ayahuasca, a psychoactive tea traditional to a number of Indigenous South American peoples.
Levine says he hopes that “Nine Perfect Strangers” will help these therapies go mainstream. Psychedelic-assisted therapy isn’t quite legal yet in the United States, but it’s close. MDMA is on track for FDA approval in 2023, and psilocybin is expected to gain approval a year or two after that.
And while you can’t (officially) attend your own Tranquillum in the U.S. just yet, you can travel to other parts of the globe: Psychedelics such as psilocybin and ayahuasca are offered at retreats in countries including Jamaica and Costa Rica, where these substances are legal.
These therapies show immense promise in both one-on-one and group settings and, as Masha says, they could “change everything.” And though Levine would call her method “unorthodox-slash-questionable,” he never wanted to portray her as a “snake oil salesman.”
Instead, the team behind the series discussed prominent, enigmatic figures such as Willy Wonka and Elizabeth Holmes to gain a sense of Masha’s intentions.
“She’s obsessed with fixing these people, and she will do anything to make that idea that you can fix people in 10 days come true,” Levine says. “Including things that kind of run contrary to that idea. So there’s a bit of hypocrisy to her as well. But I also think there’s a nobility in her quest.”
The series might stretch the truth a bit in terms of what real-life psychedelic-assisted therapy might look like, but the creative team wanted to be as accurate as possible when portraying the hypnotic feeling of sinking into a trip.
Levine says he worked with the cinematographer to give things a “progression.”
They mapped out specific choices for lenses, compositions and even colors used in the frame to make the viewer feel like “your mushrooms have kicked in and you haven’t even noticed.”
The blur between reality and the trip was important.
“We didn’t want to do a thing where there was a line between ‘Now everyone’s messed up,’ ” Levine says. “We wanted to sort of subtly do it and have the altered state just sort of take over so that you’re questioning what’s real and what’s not.”
Levine wanted the series to reflect open-mindedness about where these therapies are going.
“Whatever we’re doing now is not working,” he says. “Masha gives that speech at the beginning of the fourth episode where — essentially there’s a bit of madness to her in that moment, but there’s also a feeling that this could change the world.”