9 Perfect Strangers and the (toxic) culture of well-being

The obsession with self-care to the rhythm of yoga classes, detox drinks, supplements to be taken as soon as you get up, crystal therapy and self-help manuals represents the excess that the pursuit of well-being has reached. The series 9 Perfect Strangers, visible on Amazon Prime, taken from the book by Liane Moriarty and with Nicole Kidman in the role of Masha, a saint of Russian origins, almost caricatured the extremism of the culture of well-being and its consumerist ideology.

Nine Perfect Strangers tells of a group of complete strangers, victims of trauma not overcome and united by the need to put order within themselves, who retreat to a luxurious wellness center called Calm House led by Masha, body and soul of the structure, a character as ambiguous as seductive, a spiritual guide at times manipulative and with a mania for control.

For his guests he prepares rituals, moments of leisure and play, detoxifying foods and drinks, breathing and meditation sessions… In short, everything that the West has imported from the East, transforming it into a billionaire business.

The characters embody the clichés and frailties of contemporary society. There is a family that has lost a child, a failed writer, a drug addicted sports champion, a wife who is the victim of an abusive husband and there is an influencer, Jessica, (accompanied by her husband in Lamborghini) who is so obsessed with aesthetic aspect that even tries to hide pores and freckles, and is the victim of the judgment of his followers. She is so emotionally addicted that when she imagines her own death she doesn’t think about the pain of the family, but thinks about the social commentators and the fact that they will soon forget about her. In a hallucination scene you imagine losing your nose, needless to say by a good cosmetic surgeon. It is she, Jessica, the fictional character who manages to tell the crudest truth about the distorted perception of reality that social media have fueled and of which beautiful girls, thirsting for perfection, are often the victims.

But what is true in the artfully constructed world of Tranquility? Among the most controversial rituals shown in the series is the use of psychedelics in “controlled” doses according to the Masha method. Some might even remind you of another wellness mecca, Goop by Gwyneth Paltrow and specifically the Goop Lab episode in which her team goes to Jamaica with naive curiosity to document this healing journey through psychedelic drugs. After all, always Gwyneth, already in 2019, had stated that psychedelics would become the wellness trend of the future.

Guests have their cell phones seized, they have all the comforts to feel better than at home, two aspects common in most of the retreat of this type, designed precisely to avoid distractions. Equally real is the sense of union that develops between the participants about to face an inner rebirth that, in the series, beyond the lawfulness of the methods, in the end takes place in a decisive way.

The image that Nine Perfect Strangers offering temples of well-being for the privileged rich remains, however, negative. Masha sneaks into her guests’ rooms in the middle of the night and neglects to inform them when she starts giving them psilocybin, hiding it in colorful morning smoothies. Masha is right about one thing: the suffering, always present during the therapeutic process. Pain is, for better or for worse, an inextricable part of healing, and proper healing takes time. All nine protagonists manage to overcome their inner boulders by experiencing a painful situation, an extreme experience that, in a cathartic way, serves to shatter the trauma and produce a regeneration.

Retreat gurus don’t normally administer psychedelics. They accompany people through practices such as meditation which have a unique ability to bring out and dissolve emotions without people having to consciously eliminate them. During a retreat you learn to lighten your body and soul and to become observers of your inner states.

At the end of it all, 9 Perfect Strangers reminds us that the search for well-being started with simple spa days and quinoa, has become a elite business world-wide, feeding on insecurities and vulnerabilities, all too often based on the idea that there is something “wrong” with us all, “toxins” that need to be thrown out. That’s why the series is set up as the bewildering satire of wellness culture and what happens when it goes too far.