In Nine Perfect Strangers, some varyingly troubled individuals arrive at a California retreat led by a spiritual healer whose intentions are as spotty as her Russian accent. The 201 7 Gore Verbinski cult film A Cure for Wellness imagined an overworked Wall Streeter going missing at a mysterious Swiss health resort plagued by secrets and lots and lots of eels. The recent HBO show The White Lotus took a ruthlessly sociological approach to the model, skewering the toxic privilege of a group of vacationers in Hawaii like sharks in a barrel. Nine Perfect Strangers is an entry in the emerging genre of wellness horror, in which a group of wealthy, miserable people who are paying silly amounts of money to feel better about themselves ends up instead in a spa-weekend version of Dante’s Inferno. What your blender does for a farmers’-market haul, Kelley and his co-creator, John-Henry Butterworth, have managed for genres: The series, as it cycles through satire, horror, and prestige psychodrama, can’t quite decide whether the wellness industry is a virulent scam or a desperately needed curative for broken souls. Like HBO’s Big Little Lies, the show is adapted from a novel by Liane Moriarty, and its setup-a self-help and wellness retreat goes very wrong-seems irresistible. Kelley’s new miniseries on Hulu, is an image of fruit being pulverized into gloop, which is also how my brain felt after watching the first six episodes. The defining motif of Nine Perfect Strangers, David E.
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