Every season of Mike White’s black comedy anthology series The White Lotus begins at the end—namely, with a flash forward to the aftermath of a murder. In season one, it was to a body being loaded onto a plane heading out of Hawaii, and in season two, it was to a corpse floating toward a Sicilian beach. The show’s third season starts even closer to the action, with gunfire interrupting the birdsong at a luxurious island resort in Thailand, before catapulting us into the past, as tourists approach their doomed Eden by boat.
Godspeed to these travelers, whose cursed vacation makes for rather entertaining viewing. Rick (Walton Goggins), a withdrawn grump who reveals flashes of vulpine charm, is here with his younger, new-agey girlfriend, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), who radiates enough vim to turn their sparkless relationship into a star-crossed romance. Longtime friends Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), Laurie (Carrie Coon), and Kate (Leslie Bibb), reunited after an era apart, are quick to dredge up old resentments and pore over fresh gossip. The five-piece Ratliff family is a tangle of solipsism, delusion, and psychosexual confusion. And last but certainly not least is Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), the endearing spa manager from season one, who’s visiting to learn from the experts at this wellness-focused haven of Buddhist spirituality.
The problem is that The White Lotus follows its adrenaline-pumping opening by turning down the heat and taking the lid off the pot. Across the six out of eight episodes provided to press for review, characters repeat similar arguments, simmer in mostly static tensions, and otherwise spin their wheels—as the ultra-rich are, I guess, wont to do. Though the cast gives magnetic performances and the atmosphere proves characteristically transportive, the season ultimately feels like a blunter, less jolting riff on the show’s tried-and-true formula. It’s intriguing, but self-defeatingly lethargic. It’s often quite funny but not as consistently as its predecessors. And though it packs a bite, it still feels as if it’s prowling on familiar ground.
The hallmark of The White Lotus—the often exaggerated humor and satire that expose the relatable anxieties of its characters—is on fullest display in the depiction of the Ratliffs, who hail, with amusingly intense pride, from North Carolina. For one, Victoria (Parker Posey), the brood’s pill-popping matriarch, is barely tethered to reality; she seems to snap to this plane of existence when she speaks, only to immediately drift into another dimension. Her laugh-out-loud absurdity helps to ease the absence of Jennifer Coolidge’s similarly oblivious Tanya McQuoid—and, as with Tanya, it eventually betrays glimpses into her deep-seated sadness.
Victoria isn’t the most present parent but neither is her husband, Timothy (Jason Isaacs), a financier who comes to stare down the barrel of a gun, both literally and figuratively, for his white-collar crimes. As Timothy’s sins catch up to him, his gradual spiral illuminates the fragility of economic security, the tenuousness of bonds formed by money, and the legacy that he’s imparted to his three kids through his myopic pursuit of wealth.
His eldest, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), the bro-y nepo baby of a nepo baby, lives solely to please his father, whom he works for. (Schwarzenegger, son of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, is a fun casting choice.) Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), the middle child, studies Buddhism to find the purpose that her materialistic upbringing has withheld from her. And Lochlan (Sam Nivola), a high school senior, struggles to assert control over his fate; he’s too kind, or too thoroughly molded by the trajectory set out for him by his family, to upset a soul.
While the guests practice yoga, meditate, and get massages, the retreat’s staff carry on with their lives. We watch the ridiculously sweet attempts of security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) to woo a friend and co-worker, Mook (Lalisa Manobal), and the fruitful cultural exchange between Belinda and her counterpart, Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul), whose tenderness rivals Gaitok’s. But the season largely leaves the thoughts of these characters about their work and the people it serves unexplored. That disconnect is, perhaps, the point—a statement about the chasms that separate the classes, about the alienation of labor in what amounts to a micro-colony of the extremely affluent—but it leads the proceedings to feel incohesive.
Instead, season three works best as a mood piece. We see locals place offerings at altars to earn the protection of spirits—and the camerawork, in turn, suggests that there might actually be something out there, with restless establishing and transition shots that snake along barely lit paths, like predatory beasts or more spectral beings. Elsewhere, energetic montages unleash a crush of sensation and affect: One particularly stimulating sequence cuts between a debaucherous dip in the pool and a drug-fueled night out, as Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score picks up, simultaneously haunting and irresistibly percussive. It’s enough to thrust you into the mind of a carefree libertine at the White Lotus—to make you forget, if only for a few moments, that there are vast seas, an entire world, beyond this island and its shallows.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
