Nicole Kidman’s Nine Perfect Strangers returns for season two but it’s a whole lot of nonsense

Well, that was a whole lot of nonsense.

You really have to ask, why. Why did the Nine Perfect Strangers folks decide to make a second season when the first instalment was, at best, divisive, and when there wasn’t even any source material to take the story further.

It’s not as if Liane Moriarty had written a sequel.

The Nicole Kidman-helmed show had stirred more than the usual curiosity when it was released in 2021 during the second COVID lockdown.

A lot of that had to do with the fact the show was shot in Byron Bay, at a time when a slate of international productions had called Australia home because our screen sector was up and running. Big Hollywood names including Melissa McCarthy, Luke Evans, Bobby Cannavale and Michael Shannon swanning around the Northern Rivers was so fun, and it made us feel a little more important and glam by proxy.

It felt as if Nine Perfect Strangers was one of ours, but with the added sheen and starpower of international celebs, money and production values.

But that didn’t mean the show was particularly great, even though it certainly had its highlights, including some compelling character dynamics. Unfortunately, Kidman’s character, Mascha, wasn’t one of them, and she’s the one that’s carried over into this confusing second season.

If you’ve forgotten, Mascha was the “guru” of the wellness retreat that was micro-dosing her guests so they could viscerally connect with whatever trauma that ailed them.

She herself was carrying immense grief from the death of her young daughter some years earlier, and the drug protocol she had created allowed her to see and engage with her dead kid? Maybe? Or maybe it was just some crazy trip and she was hallucinating? It was very baffling.

With this second season, Masha is now running a luxurious lodge in the Austrian Alps, which used to belong to her mentor Helena (Lena Olin). There’s a whole new cast of guests, the titular nine strangers.

The production has brought together a stellar ensemble, including Murray Bartlett as Brian, a former children’s TV puppeteer who was cancelled after (non-sexual) abusive behaviour on set, Annie Murphy and Christine Baranski as Imogen and Victoria, a mother and daughter with a lot of resentments, Dolly de Leon (Triangle of Sadness) as a former nun overcome with guilt (hey, Catholicism!), Maisie Richardson-Sellers and King Princess as musician couple Wolfie and Tina, and Henry Golding as Peter, the son of satellites and weapons billionaire David (Mark Strong).

They’re all gathered for Masha’s regimen, and most have emotional weight from which they would like to be unburdened.

David is just looking for his next investment opportunity.

The conceit behind Nine Perfect Strangers and Masha’s promise, is that if we can return to these traumatic moments in our lives, and re-litigate them, then we can change our relationship to that pain. Maybe move on or maybe just learn to live with it productively.

But her character’s tethering to her dead child, which does have a cathartic reckoning in the season finale, doesn’t quite gel. Out of everyone, she is the one who is most held back by her past. Not exactly the picture of mental health to aspire to.

Most episodes are focused on the story of one particular guest, so their effectiveness or not largely depends on whether you connect to that character. Very few are that interesting. Golding gets to cut loose, especially when he is properly dosed in a later episode but most of the actors are wasted, especially Baranski.

Not giving Baranski enough to do is offensive.

There is a greater albeit poorly plotted mystery that drives the series, culminating in an odd Agatha Christie-esque parlour room reveal that feels very contrived. By then, you don’t really care.

Nine Perfect Strangers is the opposite to something being “more than the sum of its parts”. It is only parts because the sum makes no sense. It is a hot, fetid mess, laying out on the footpath on a summer day, the smell wafting up to make your nose wrinkle.

The bits that work include the stunning snowy backdrop which looks fantastic, and if The White Lotus wants to set a future season somewhere cold, we’re not going to be mad about it.

There are also some great performances from Kidman, de Leon, Murphy, and Aras Aydin, who plays Matteo, Baranski’s younger lover.

Aydin is the only actor who gets a scene which genuinely resonates on an emotional level. It has the kind of writing that made you go, “now, why couldn’t you do that the rest of the time?”.

He’s the only character that feels, at least in that moment, real.

If there’s one upside to all this, it’s that at least with the story set and filmed in Austria, none of this jumble belongs to us.

Nine Perfect Strangers is streaming on Prime Video