Expats Review: Lulu Wang's Emigrant Drama Highlights Grief

Lulu Wang’s Expats Takes a Hard Look at Western Emigrants and Profound Grief

Exactly five years after her exciting breakout film The Farewell premiered at Sundance, director Lulu Wang has a follow-up, and it’s the type of star-led literary miniseries that the past couple years have taught us don’t always stick around in the cultural memory. Expats has been in development since before The Farewell debuted, with Wang boarding as series director in late 2019 and filming delayed by the pandemic. Expats focus on a group of American expatriates living in Hong Kong—most of them wealthy, like the steadily unraveling Margaret (Nicole Kidman) and the on-the-cusp-of-divorce Hilary (Sarayu Blue), but also the young and dispossessed Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), a Korean-American 20-something running away from herself in Hong Kong’s alienating streets.

That descriptor of Hong Kong hits upon an inherent difficulty with a show like Expats, albeit not one that the director and writers (including Janice Y.K. Lee, author of the novel, The Expatriates, which the show adapts) are ignorant of. Coloring any city as a space for Westerners (even if only one of them, Margaret, is white) to feel isolated and disorientated—and centering that disorientation as the thrust of the drama—is a bit uncomfortable. This was something echoed by Hong Kong nationals and residents upon hearing Amazon had commissioned not just Expats, but another Hong Kong-expat drama (Exciting Times starring Phoebe Dynevor has yet to rear its head).

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There’s a risk of Lost in Translation-ing your narrative by focusing on Western outsiders to a place that’s filled with real people and experiences that extend beyond what America sees as a sea of unfamiliar faces and tongues, especially during a landmark time in Hong Kong civil action, with pro-democracy and suffrage protests being shut down with militant police violence and state repression.

To Expats’ credit, the dissonance between Western individualism and the racialised dynamics that exist in a Hong Kong in flux is central to the show’s drama, including the ongoing fight for democracy. This tension is what elevates Expats to a consistently-compelling level. With her lingering, watchful camera, Wang turns her attention once again to the nuances of social structures that insist against honest communication: here, we see how wealthy, status-concerned individuals are encouraged by elite Hong Kong society to export blame onto those less benefited from a capitalist hierarchy.

Margaret blames Mercy for her young son Gus going missing in a crowded marketplace (Mercy was doing a trial shift as a nanny); Margaret also resents how close their housekeeper and nanny Essie (Ruby Ruiz) is to their family, despite the fact that her and her husband Clarke (Brian Tee) have never established boundaries to prevent this, and rarely consider that perhaps extorting a Filipina woman’s labor, that keeps her away from her actual family, is more of an inconvenience for her than them.

Hilary feels the pressure of the prescriptive role for married women in the upper echelons of Hong Kong society, in that she has not had several children and instead suffers a loudly imperfect marriage to David (Jack Huston), who’s been having an affair with Mercy since Gus disappeared. For obvious reasons, Mercy feels enormous guilt in relation to both women, conveyed with an unnerving and gasping tension in a party sequence in Episode 1, where as a hospitality server, Mercy and the glamorous Margaret catch sight of each for the first time in months. The fact that Mercy feels like she owes something to women whose financial status guarantees them far more power than she is capable of wielding is a poignant strand of Expats’ exploration of how social hierarchies recode one’s emotional and moral perspective.

Yoo’s performance is the strongest out of the main trio; Mercy is a character who, despite often being bluntly vocal about her desires and fears, rarely spends a scene not navigating power dynamics that disfavor her. Kidman is doing, well, the type of uptight and short-tempered white wife acting that she’s become iconic for, but despite having the deepest well of grief to pull from, it’s sometimes difficult to see past just how entitled a character Margaret is, especially when she exports nearly all culpability for Gus’ disappearance onto others. And credit to Sarayu Blue: Hilary is such a frustrating character, the most critical of Hong Kong social hierarchies but still replicating class prejudices with no self-awareness, and it’s a contradiction that Blue embodies nimbly.

These contradictions become especially apparent when a 97-minute penultimate episode turns its gaze onto the servant class of Hong Kong’s wealthy, undermining even the most generous of Margaret and Hilary’s interactions with their staff by reminding us that they can only relate to their “helpers” through a self-centered and exploitative perspective. In fact, when the final episode tries to reach a sublime, truthful resolution to the main characters, the reminder of Margaret and Hilary’s myopic view of the world undermines their road to liberation.

The middle hours of Expats hit the most roadblocks—after a flashback second episode neatly and carefully laying down all the tension bubbling up in the first, the show spins wheels in too obvious ways, the lowest point being a fourth episode where all our characters are trapped in single locations and are forced to directly and ineffectively voice their trauma. It’s imperfections like these that chip away at Expats’ merits, giving us a worthy but imperfect next step in Wang’s career.

Expats premieres Friday, January 26th on Prime Video.

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.

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Lulu Wang’s Expats Takes a Hard Look at Western Emigrants and Profound Grief