Australian author Liane Moriarty is best known for her Kirkus-starred 2014 bestseller, Big Little Lies, which inspired an Emmy Award–winning HBO show featuring Oscar winner Nicole Kidman, who co-produced the series with David E. Kelley. Moriarty’s most recent novel, 2018’s Nine Perfect Strangers, has now been adapted as an eight-episode Hulu miniseries, also featuring Kidman, who again co-produced with Kelley; it premieres on Aug. 18. Both books and series tell tales of wealthy, flawed people—Australians in the books, Californians in the series. But while Lies tells a gripping tale that centers around a murder, Strangers make vague gestures toward big, climactic events without much follow-through.
To be fair, Strangers’ characters are just as aimless. They include nine people attending a self-improvement retreat at Tranquillium House, a resort owned and operated by a mysterious, driven Russian woman named Masha, played by Kidman. The attendees, who are generally an unpleasant and self-involved lot, include Frances (Oscar nominee Melissa McCarthy), a romance author who was recently the victim of a con-artist’s scam; a lottery-winning couple (Ready or Not’s Samara Weaving and Snowfall’s Melvin Gregg) going through marital difficulties; another couple (Oscar nominee Michael Shannon and Asher Keddie) mourning the death of their teenage son with their daughter (Tramps’ Grace Van Patten) in tow; and Carmel (Support the Girls’ Regina Hall), a divorced woman with low self-esteem. Bobby Cannavale plays a former football player (American football, not Australian Rules, as in the novel), and The Alienist’s Luke Evans appears as a journalist (not a lawyer, as in the book) who’s struggling with the idea of raising a child with his husband.
The cast also features The Good Place’s Manny Jacinto as Yao, Masha’s employee and right-hand man, and Little Fires Everywhere’s Tiffany Boone as fellow spa employee Delilah. It’s a massive cast, and in the novel Moriarty makes sure to give each and every one of these people a fairly extensive backstory. These backstories, though, don’t deliver any unexpected insights. Grieving characters work through their guilt and anger in predictable ways: The lottery winners, unsurprisingly, had a hard time adjusting to their new wealth; the romance author is deeply embarrassed that she was deceived, just as one would expect. It feels as if the author was just checking boxes—providing easy, by-the-numbers pasts that didn’t require very much effort. And, frustratingly, almost nothing in the characters’ backgrounds is particularly relevant to later events.
Moriarty lavishes so much time on this padding that nothing much happens for the first two-thirds of the novel. Masha, who became a self-help guru after a near-death experience, seems eccentric, and her methods are a bit strict—her staff secretly goes through the attendees’ luggage, for instance, and removes any forbidden items, such as alcohol or chocolate. Readers may have a vague sense of approaching danger; surely this outwardly peaceful spa is hiding a deep, dark secret, right? But aside from a few mild revelations, a few fake-outs, and an exceedingly brief moment of violence, all this anticipation comes to nothing—and the ending ensures that the characters’ problems are solved in improbably tidy ways.
This overall lack of action carries over to the first six episodes of the miniseries, directed by Long Shot’s Jonathan Levine and co-written by Kelley. The adaptation tries hard to amp up the drama—but unfortunately it does so mainly by bolting on more backstory. One character’s past, for instance, now includes a dramatic shooting, which doesn’t exist in the book; another has brand-new rage issues and an unexpected connection to another major player; and three major players are all sexually involved, for no clear reason, other than to portray the actors in various states of undress. In an odd and problematic addition, Delilah now suffers from bipolar disorder, which the story uses to create suspense: What will the mentally ill person do? To top it off, there’s an unnecessary instance of animal slaughter that’s new to the series. All these elements don’t make the story any less lethargic, though; they just make it longer, piling on more detail in the apparent hope that quantity equals quality.
It’s a shame, really, because several of the actors do fine work here. Kidman’s performance as Masha is a bit cartoonish at times, but it’s always entertaining; McCarthy makes the rather shallow Frances surprisingly pleasant to be around; and Shannon brings a startling intensity to a character who’s mostly used for comic relief in the novel. And the spa itself is gorgeous to look at, which is fortunate, because the series almost never leaves its confines. It doesn’t go anywhere.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
