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Nine Perfect Strangers, season 2, review: Nicole Kidman’s psychobabble drama is one insufferable mess
The hollow, self-indulgent Amazon Prime series remains a career low for its star
Actors playing drunk always make me giggle, they so rarely get it right. But actors playing high on psychedelic drugs raises the hysteria bar to a whole other level. As performed on the returning Nine Perfect Strangers (Amazon Prime Video), it’s excruciating.
In its first run, Nine Perfect Strangers, based on a Liane Moriarty bestseller, introduced us to glacial psychotherapist Masha, played by Nicole Kidman with an enigmatic cool that’s practically cryogenic, whose specialty is gathering a disparate group at a wellness retreat and sorting out their assorted issues.
Masha is dealing with her own grief, her young daughter having died in suspicious circumstances. She uses psychedelic drugs to unlock repressed memories and, in a stretch you really have to bend to go with, she uses the drugs to connect with the dead. I did say bend.
First time around Masha’s guinea pigs were tolerable enough. But in its second run, the discordant nonet she’s gathered at a new location, a towering sanatorium high in the Bavarian Alps, really are a piece of work. Apparently, they are all Jungian archetypes, but I’ll leave that to the psychology graduates.
To the non-shrink specialists, what they are is a supremely irritating bunch of indulged stereotypes with Mummy and Daddy issues. A TV puppeteer, a celebrity nun, a piano prodigy… put those in a joke and you might get a punchline, but open up their issues for drama and all you get is a feast of trippy over-acting.
The set-up is very Agatha Christie, the ties which bind Masha’s inmates loosely together gradually revealed over eight episodes in which her own cunning revenge plan – luring a big-shot billionaire into her spider’s web of intrigue – are gradually revealed.
It’s that central storyline, Nicole Kidman’s Masha shadow-boxing with Mark Strong’s media magnate David Shark, where Nine Perfect Strangers really sticks in the craw. Every time they cross swords and dig into their dark history – spoiler: she blames him for the death of her daughter – they somehow end up having a snog. Yeah, I can see how that would happen.
Full of lazy dated references (we get characters doing Spice Girls repartee, like it’s the 1990s all over again) and dreary psychobabble that’s meant to sound to sound meaningful but just comes across as cringe – “Are you afraid to go deeper?” – this really is a career low for Kidman, Strong and a supporting cast including Christine Baranski, Murray Bartlett and Annie Murphy, none of whom convince that their characters are anything more than cyphers from a psychology textbook.
We’ve had a lot of rich folk trauma dramas lately and Nine Perfect Strangers adds very little to the party with its uninspired rehash of Philip Larkin’s This Be The Verse (“They f--k you up, your mum and dad”). It looks glamorous and talks the prestige TV talk, but it’s a hollow, self-indulgent emotional vacuum.
As Strong’s bad billionaire faced his supposed comeuppance at the closing episode’s Poirot-style dénouement, his exasperated outburst took the words right out of my keyboard: ‘Just f---king kill me, I can’t take any more!”
Nine Perfect Strangers season 2 comes to Amazon Prime Video on Thursday 22 May