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Irish Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Nine Perfect Strangers review: The only people likely to be traumatised by this moribund thriller are the viewers
Nicole Kidman has worked hard over the past decade to parlay her Hollywood fame into a parallel career as a force in prestige television. She hasn't given up on the big screen, and was recently to be found steaming it up in a romp about a brief but intense affair with a much younger man, Babygirl . But it is with shows such as Big Little Lies that she has had the most success – a track record that comes to a tumultuous halt with the appalling second series of Nine Perfect Strangers (Prime Video from Thursday). Season one was an undercooked tale of paranoia and skulduggery set amidst a retreat for the mega-wealthy. It had the bad luck to launch in the same summer as White Lotus – a tale of paranoia and skulduggery set amidst a retreat for the mega-wealthy. One became a phenomenon, the other did not - despite top mugging by Kidman as gurning guru Masha Dmitrichenko in her unsettling statement wig. Four years later, Masha is somehow still in business, despite the previous season culminating in an orgy of paranoia and violence. True, several massive lawsuits and 'multiple Federal investigations' are looming. No matter. A billionaire in the Bavarian Alps wants to whisk Masha – and her new wig – away from her legal woes, on the proviso she runs another retreat with another nine volunteers. Kidman does her best, but her performance is 90 per cent iffy Russian accent. Meanwhile, this year's cast of dysfunctional one-per-centers make for a threadbare bunch – the quality of guest cameos low to non-existent. Series one featured Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon and Luke Evans – the best the follow-up can muster is White Lotus's Murray Bartlett (as a disgraced kids' TV presenter) and indie singer King Princess, playing a tortured piano prodigy. The biggest star aside from Kidman is Mark Strong, a mega-bucks baddie who shares a dark history with Masha. READ MORE The White Lotus-ness of it all is hard to get past. The difference is that the HBO hit had the pretence of social satire (that satire was, in fact, just hipster nihilism, but it did string you along convincingly). Nine Perfect Strangers, by contrast, has nothing to say, and while it knows what it wants to be – Agatha Christie for audiences weaned on Succession – it has no idea how to get there. Masha's big gimmick is using psychedelic drugs to both unlock one's inner trauma and, so she claims, communicate with the dead. However, the only people likely to be traumatised by this moribund thriller are the viewers. Unlike the characters corralled in Nine Perfect Strangers, they have the choice of running for the hills – an option many will find all too tempting. Nine Perfect Strangers season two is on Prime Video now
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
One-take wonders: How ‘The Studio', ‘Adolescence,' ‘The Pitt' created movie-like magic
Once an occasional big-screen feat steered by the legendary likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Paul Thomas Anderson, long takes — aka one-shots or 'oners' — are now a staple of prestige episodic TV. From The Bear to True Detective and Mr. Robot, TV producers have been increasingly employing the cinematic technique in service of their small-screen stories, elevating their image and awards potential through dexterously choreographed shots that require a great deal of skill and set-wide coordination. This season, take Apple TV+'s The Studio from creators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. With episodes shot by one camera in continuous takes (one of them, guest-starring Oscar winner Sarah Polley, is even titled "The Oner"), Rogen and Goldberg's Hollywood satire navigates the all-too-real trials and tribulations of a fictional movie studio's executives with breathtaking pace, maintained expertly by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra. 'It takes a really committed team of people. There are no shortcuts,' Newport-Berra (whose credits also include Euphoria and The Bear) tells Gold Derby. 'At first, it really intimidated some of the actors and crew. But once we started to get takes that worked, everyone latched onto it.' With most of the crew coming from a cinematic background, the team pulled references from films that they loved (Newport-Berra especially gushes about the 1957 Soviet movie The Cranes Are Flying by Mikhail Kalatozov). 'Seth and Evan are film nerds. I'm a film nerd. All my crew are film nerds," he says. "We all love television, but film is why we got into this. And that's the spirit of the show: fewer cameras, less coverage, more character driven, and very intentional.' More from GoldDerby It's Charlie Cox vs. Vincent D'Onofrio in dueling 'Daredevil: Born Again' Emmy bids: Complete list of acting submissions for Marvel series Darth Maul animated series coming to Disney+ and more of today's top stories 'Boop! The Musical' and 'Smash' writer Bob Martin on bringing 2 iconic women to life through humor: 'Comedy is always rooted in pain' SEESeth Rogen explains how 'The Studio' pulled off its one-shot episode Throughout, Newport-Berra kept a close eye on the rhythm and necessity of the one takes, making sure they were never landing as a gimmick. 'I didn't want to feel like it was ever holding the show back,' he explains. 'And they work well because they induce a level of anxiety, momentum and energy that we relate to as filmmakers.' Of course, a good oner had to start at the script level. 'Seth and Evan are very good at writing for that visual approach,' he says. 'That really helped us pull it off.' In planning the shots, the crew would arrive early in the morning with Rogen and Goldberg, do a walk-through, and toss ideas around in terms of creative blocking opportunities and interesting angles. Then they'd go over everything with the cast. 'Practice and and rehearse. And then at a certain point, we would start filming it with an iPad [as a trial].' Episode 2 ("The Oner") was an especially exciting challenge, with the one-take style of the episode mirroring the scene that Polley, playing herself, shoots within the story. But an equally unforgettable experience was shooting an episode with Martin Scorsese, the filmmaker who pulled off one of film history's most iconic continuous takes: the Copacabana shot in Goodfellas. 'He was a dream to work with,' Newport-Berra remembers. 'The second he walked on set, he started telling stories about his film career. It was really beautiful. He radiates a really positive energy and was really excited to be on set. He's the model of what a filmmaker should be.' Still, the team was understandably anxious to shoot with one of the greatest directors alive, especially because they didn't quite have the time to explain their visual approach to Scorsese before he showed up on set to play himself. 'We were basically just going to dump it on him when he got there: 'Hey, we're shooting all your scenes all in one take, with one camera.'' To be on the safe side, Rogen had a second camera on standby that day. 'Seth was like, 'I don't want to be the guy who pisses off Scorsese,'' he laughs. 'But Scorsese was like, 'Great, let's do it. I love it.' So that second camera never saw the light of day, and we were able to maintain the integrity of the show.' For Netflix's ambitious four-episode limited series Adolescence — a psychological crime drama created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham — the chief concern DP Matthew Lewis had early on was how to make the show's continuous takes (each episode is its own oner) a key part of its storytelling, without allowing the technical achievement aspect of it overshadow the camera's purpose. Luckily, he was no stranger to long takes, having shot Boiling Point with director Philip Barantini (also of Adolescence). 'What we learned from Boiling Point was that there's a very grounded version of a one-shot that is very character focused,' Lewis explains to Gold Derby. 'So here, I knew that the one shots should echo the emotion and the performance of a scene directly. I didn't want flamboyance or crazy moves to get in the way.' SEE'It's saving lives': 'Adolescence' stars Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper on the series' stunning success With that spirit, Lewis stuck with his understated style, aiming to avoid 'the feeling of a camera operator there' as much as possible in following the crime-drama's key characters: a young boy accused of the murder, his family, and various other legal and law enforcement players, likening the experience to doing a play. An especially challenging scene for Lewis was Episode 3 — mostly shot in one room, with the film's young suspect Jamie (Owen Cooper) meeting with a psychologist (Erin Doherty). 'It was really challenging creatively because of how precise it had to be so you don't feel the camera,' he says. 'If I'm moving down a corridor but not framed up perfectly, there is a certain energy, and you can hide errors in that,' he explains. 'But any imperfection here would've thrown you completely out of it.' Ultimately, his approach was respecting the energy of the dialogue, thinking himself as a character in the scene who wouldn't just be invasively walking around the two. 'I'd just look at them for a bit, take it in, and when the awkwardness is gone, then there would be a bit of flow, and I could start to gently float around them. All the compositional decisions were based on how someone was feeling' While its continuous takes are different than Adolescence and The Studio — for starters, they aren't as long — Max's The Pitt, created by R. Scott Gemmill, is no less complex and impressive thanks to the skills of cinematographer Johanna Coelho. Following a group of emergency room doctors in a Pittsburgh hospital's chaotic ER on one especially eventful day — each of the 15 episodes account for a single consecutive hour of the same day — The Pitt takes the audience on a character and event-driven journey, with Coelho's elegant long takes echoing the momentum of the proceedings — heartbreaking, harrowing, often bloody, and altogether compassionate. SEEHow 'The Pitt' created such an immersive medical drama 'The scripts were written in a very immersive way, so we really wanted to have a documentary-like approach,' Coelho says. 'The camera would be like a ghost staff member.' Making it all look as realistic as possible was a priority for the team, making sure the camera and the bright lighting captured the gripping intensity and the unsettling nature of the experience. 'We wanted to be very accurate on skin tones. And our style was handheld to support the documentary-like identity and feeling.' To move freely and uninterrupted within the set, Coelho used a ZeeGee rig. 'It is kind of a Steadicam vest with a Steadicam arm, but it has the handheld feeling to it,' she says. 'That helped us control our movement better to really flow through the story with the characters and feel completely immersed in it realistically.' One of the longest shots she captured in the series was one in Episode 4, following Dr. Robbie (Noah Wyle) and nurse Dana (Katherine LaNasa), a girl taken to the ER due to a fentanyl case, and the family of another patient, her friend. 'It felt right not to cut that scene as Robbie and Dana start walking from the break room [as other things happen]. You are basically stuck with events and the pain of the scene.' Choreographing the actors and blocking was always a challenge of course, but never more so than the series' stunning episodes that revolve around a mass shooting, with the ER overflowing with injured victims admitted in color-coded areas depending on the severity of their condition. 'We normally only have two cameras," she says. "But we brought in a third camera to accommodate the additional characters in the same space at the same time. Keeping track of all the elements happening, following the action and the characters moving and making sure the audience can understand where they are, was probably the hardest thing.' To Coelho, TV has been operating with high cinematic standards for a while now, with artists pushing the idea of what TV can look like. 'For us, the cinematic aspect was having a shallower depth of field to make people feel more trapped in The Pitt," she says. "You follow a character and you keep going with them. You only can see what they see.' The secret, Coelho says, is coordination. "Our actors were excellent, and the background was amazing. Everyone really learned how to choreograph and dance together," she says. 'When things start working together, it's flawless." Best of GoldDerby 'Your Friends and Neighbors' changed how Amanda Peet thought of intimacy coordinators 'Paradise' star Julianne Nicholson on the ruthless Sinatra: 'I love that she's an evil genius, but she's not just an evil genius' All 34 'Black Mirror' episodes ranked, including 'USS Callister: Into Infinity' and 'Eulogy' Click here to read the full article.
