Mike White’s The White Lotus returned last month, this time in Thailand, for a murder mystery like no other. Seriously, the crime rate in this hotel chain must be getting close to having a star removed from its listing on whichever luxury booking website these outrageously rich Americans are using.
In our first jet-set outing without the comedically genius Jennifer Coolidge as Tanya (or Monica Vitti… or Peppa Pig), expectations for our latest anthology cast were thrown up in the air. Tanya’s story is not quite done, though, it seems, with the return of Jon Gries’s malevolent Greg, who played a part in the scheme behind her death last season. Throw in Jason Isaacs’s Timothy, the husband of Parker Posey’s Victoria, and the direction towards chaos seems unclear yet certain to end in disaster. With the help of Posey’s outrageously Southern irritability as the lorazepam-induced matriarch Victoria, a now all-too-familiar soap-operatic family dynamic is clearly brewing towards chaos.
Performances from an inescapably British Aimee Lou Wood and a warring trio of frenemies—Leslie Bibb, Michelle Monaghan, and Carrie Coon—round off the cast with the comedic genius expected from The White Lotus too. While this outing is clearly a slow burn, the dynamic of this cast makes for undeniably fun viewing.
The series is underscored again by a return-to-form performance behind the scenes, with a perfectly twisted and tension-mongering score provided by Cristobal Tapia de Veer.
It is fair to question the slow-paced nature of the show, as has become familiar over the course of each series. However, we are inescapably aware that this week in paradise will end in the death of at least one of our holidaymakers, as revealed in episode one. With only fragments of the story coming together two-thirds of the way in, this destined nightmare is hard to take your eye off.
Photo by Sara Dubler on Unsplash