Kidman's perfectly brilliant as an obsessive, drugged-up therapist: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV
Nine Perfect Strangers (Amazon Prime Video)
Rating:
Brace yourself for scandalous gossip. You'll be gobsmacked. The sublime Christine Baranski slips this line into Nine Perfect Strangers, as she greets a celebrity nun.
'Sister Agnes, I've met you before,' she purrs. 'Rome, wasn't it? I think Elton played, but he couldn't have, not for a benefit for the Catholic Church.'
And explaining herself to the bemused other guests, she drops her bombshell: ' Elton John is gay.'
This second series, based on Liane Moriarty's bestseller, overflows with sharp dialogue, crammed with so many clever asides that in places it has the archness and pacing of a sitcom.
Baranski plays an oversexed septuagenarian called Victoria O'Clair, treating her toyboy lover Matteo to a therapy retreat in the Bavarian Alps. She introduces her petulant offspring Imogen (Annie Murphy) with delicious spite: 'You must excuse my daughter — 35 is such a difficult age. It's when the panic really sets in.'
Sister Agnes (Dolly de Leon) has come in search of 'absolution — but only She can grant that'. Who is the mysterious 'She'? Why, God, of course.
You'd be excused for thinking the nun is talking about the show's resident deity, Nicole Kidman, wearing an ice-blonde wig and a face so flawless yet immobile, it appears to be a porcelain mask.
Kidman is perfectly brilliant as the fragile, obsessive therapist Masha, part visionary and part insane control freak. Masha has devised a 'psychedelic drug delivery system' that enables her clients to 'experience memories as if for the first time, in a highly neuroplastic state'.
In other words, she doses their drinks with magic mushrooms, and watches on a network of hidden CCTV cameras as they lose their minds. Her obsequious pet scientist Martin (Lucas Englander) lays down some ground rules: 'No imperfect dosage, no dosage without consent, and no dosing yourself.'
But Masha has already broken that last rule, with the result that she is followed everywhere by the ghost of her young daughter, Tatiana. When Masha is being feted on stage, as a psychotherapy superstar, the little girl is sitting in the wings with her arms wrapped round her knees. And at night, Tatiana stands beside her mother's bed, whispering, 'I can't sleep. I never sleep.'
Like that other murder-and-meditation thriller, The White Lotus, this series demands concentration. We have to get to grips with a dozen characters, all with their own neuroses.
Wolfie and Tina (Maisie Richardson-Sellers and King Princess) are a lesbian couple with a thing about pianos. Super-rich idler Peter (Henry Golding) has daddy issues, a problem made worse by the fact that Daddy (Mark Strong) is an evil billionaire and one of Masha's ex-lovers.
Murray Bartlett, a former White Lotus star himself, is a TV entertainer and puppeteer with a very short fuse. It's enough to make your head spin. Nurse — more drugs please!
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