Perfect stranger movie twist
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Not smoothies specifically, but just abstract transitions that tangentially tie into the themes of the story. For instance, while the Picnic at Hanging Rock vibe is acknowledged and appreciated - just like it was in M Night Shyamalan's Old - he keeps making strange choices, like cutting to slow motion shots of smoothies being blitzed, which is a very Lars von Trier thing to do.
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Part of the reason for this mediocrity is that it feels generic, despite the fact that every episode is directed by one person - Jonathan Levine, a fantastic filmmaker, who has stepped so far outside his comfort zone with this one that it begins to feel as if he’s lost. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, of course, but in mediocre shows such as this, it becomes almost necessary.
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With no one to emotionally latch onto, it becomes increasingly likely for the viewer to simply switch off. While it definitely improves as it goes along - episode three is the strongest of the preview batch - I’d imagine most people wouldn’t have much interest in watching Melissa McCarthy and Bobby Cannavale's verbal duels every few minutes or have any patience for Regina Hall’s insufferable Carmel at all.Īnother critical error that Nine Perfect Strangers makes is that it doesn’t have an audience surrogate character. Nine Perfect Strangers has a stacked cast.īecause as it stands - unevenly written and undone by a tonal imbalance - it isn’t engaging enough. If only one of them would have the decency to drop dead, it would make the show infinitely more engaging. The hilariously-named Napoleon Marconi ( Michael Shannon, doing a ‘thing’) and his wife Heather are grieving the death of their teenage son to suicide an abrasive writer is reckoning with a growing feeling of irrelevance a former star athlete is trying to shake his pill addiction a millennial couple is grappling with inadequacy and a meek, middle-aged woman is looking to rebuild her life after being dumped by her husband. Nearly every one of her ‘guests’ is, in some way, suffering from a mental health issue. She’s sort of like a variation of Brit Marling’s character from The OA - someone who experienced a near death experience which awakened her inner Osho - but she’s also a quack who throws out gems like, ‘Pre-industrial man didn’t get depressed because he was too busy working’. But her motivations are deliberately murky. One character describes her as an ‘Eastern-bloc unicorn’, and that isn’t entirely inaccurate. We begin with the titular strangers arriving at a luxury retreat run by an enigmatic Russian woman named Masha, played by Kidman in a sort of performance that is both absurdly over-the-top, but also frustratingly opaque. Those who’ve read Moriarty’s novel would know what’s in store, but I wonder if that’s enough to enhance the experience of watching the show. In fact, it’s still a mystery after three episodes. After having personally witnessed the heartbreak of dwindling viewership with his earlier show, Enlightened, he ensured that The White Lotus began with an instantly-immersive ‘hook’ - in this case, a flash-forward that teased a murder.īut superficial similarities aside, Nine Perfect Strangers takes far too long to explain what it’s actually about. For instance, this is exactly the strategy that Mike White cleverly used to lure audiences to his HBO show The White Lotus.