It’d be a pretty big story if multiple people were murdered at multiple locations of the same five-star resort chain within a few years, right?
The third season of The White Lotus starts the way these things do: with the revelation that somebody will die before the season is over. Once again we don’t know who that person is, and won’t until the end of the season, but death is coming, and this season builds up a robust slate of potential victims (and perpetrators). And given the number of gunshots heard in the opening scene, it’s entirely possible the whole cast winds up in coffins before all is said and done.
Based on the six episodes made available to press (out of eight total this season), the social satire of The White Lotus hasn’t lost any of its sting. Mike White’s latest exploration of the class and sexual dynamics between the uber wealthy and the people who serve them introduces a mostly new cast in the Thai paradise of Phuket. Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sam Nivola, and Sarah Catherine Hook are a family from North Carolina with distinctly different goals in Thailand who are riven by the eternal war between UNC and Duke. (Oh, and Isaacs’ finance exec is about to go to jail for all kinds of corruption, unbeknownst to the rest of his family.) Michelle Monaghan is a famous actress on vacation with two childhood best friends played by Leslie Bibb and Carrie Coon; they fall in with a handsome Russian “energy healer” while searching for a good time in Phuket. Walton Goggins is an ornery Walton Goggins type with a tragic backstory who’s in Thailand for mysterious personal reasons, and Aimee Lou Wood is his much younger British girlfriend. Natasha Rothwell returns as Belinda, the spa manager from the Maui resort in the first season of The White Lotus, and Nicholas Duvernay is her grown son, who joins her halfway through the season. Tayme Thapthimthong is a friendly, well-meaning security guard who’s tentatively wooing a spa employee played by Lalisa Manobal (aka Blackpink member Lisa). And Christian Friedel, Lek Patravadi, Julian Kostov, Morgana O’Reilly, Dom Hetrakul and others play various other White Lotus employees, who might be even more tangential to the action than the resort staff from previous seasons.
As the season progresses, plots and characters start to intertwine in predictably unexpected ways, with the constant threat of violence and self-destruction looming over everybody. And this time there’s also a solid dose of incestuous homoerotic intrigue.
There are also some surprises. Reviews aren’t supposed to talk about those. They’re significant. Let’s just say this season isn’t exclusively interested in what happens in Thailand, and that there are more callbacks to earlier seasons than the trailers might lead you to expect.
There’s a bit of diminishing returns at play here. We get it: rich people are callous, self-obsessed, insincere, insecure, and full of the same foibles and weaknesses as everybody else, only magnified by their wealth and the disconnection from reality that creates. And the employees of five-star resorts like The White Lotus are fully subject to their whims, while also having to deal with their own issues. The notes are different but the tune starts to sound the same.
Thankfully the new setting is gorgeous, of course. The soundtrack, full of Thai rock, pop, and dance music from the last several decades, is the best this show has ever sounded. And every single shot of a monkey is absolutely amazing. They’re often used between scenes when the mood shifts, and they’re all perfectly timed, both adorable and auspicious at the same time. Mike White clearly has a top notch nature documentary in him.
What this new season excels at above all else is atmosphere. As it intercuts between different groups of characters fully indulging in the debauchery Thailand is known for in the west, the encroaching darkness becomes palpable; rarely have scenes of unbridled fun and ecstasy felt so ominous. And several of the individual performances are tremendous. HBO royalty like Coon and Goggins are as good here as you’d expect, and Rothwell is just as human and easy to like as she was in the first season. Thapthimthong shines as the employee with the most developed storyline, but The White Lotus is still clearly more interested in its guests than its staff. And Isaacs convincingly sells the despair and utter emptiness of a wealthy patriarch whose career—the only thing that ultimately matters in his life, and the closest thing he has to a soul—is collapsing around him.
Posey, meanwhile, does something you don’t often see on the screen. In her first scene, as her family’s being greeted by the resort’s employees, her Southern accent is atrocious. It’s broad, cartoonish, too loud and too exaggerated. It rankles, especially since Posey was raised in the South and should have this accent down pat. But then, when she’s away from strangers, around only her husband and children, the accent is much subtler. She sounds like a real person with a realistic accent. Her character, the socialite homemaker of Isaacs’ wealthy finance guy, puts on a performance of Southernness in public because that’s what she wants to be seen as. That’s how she defines herself: wife, mother, and Carolina Tarheel (not always in that order). It’s subtle but significant, and familiar to anybody who has known people like Posey’s character in real life.
There are still gaps here. The employees are still largely an afterthought. Despite Thapthimthong and Manobal’s legitimately sweet romance, its Thai characters are mostly nameless and interchangeable. It is absolutely a Western show made for a Western audience, with not enough interest in making sense of its setting and its relationship with the West. It does a better job in that regard than its predecessors in at least one crucial way, at least: it is earnest in its depiction of the Buddhist monastery that Hook’s character wants to live in and the wisdom that its world-renown monk dispenses, and disarmingly so for a show that has traditionally been so cynical and so resolutely dark in its satire. (Of course, it’s always possible the final two unscreened episodes will pull the rug here and reveal the monk to be as hollow and rotten as the show’s Americans.)
It’s hard to come to a full, final judgment on a season when you haven’t watched a full quarter of it yet. Consider that number up top to be provisional. But based on its first six episodes, the third season of The White Lotus lives up to the show’s previous work, while perpetuating some of its established weaknesses. We’ll know where we really land on this one after we’ve seen the whole thing.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.
