‘Feels flabby and elongated, with far less satiric bite’

The “very slow-burn” new series of the satire about a luxury resort is uneven and disappointing.

Look closely at the opening credit sequence of this season’s White Lotus, set at a luxury resort on the island of Koh Samui in Thailand. The camera roves over colourful drawings depicting centuries-old scenes of the landscape and culture, but soon the images of Buddhist shrines and elephants amidst flowered greenery give way to angry monkeys and shipwrecked men being eaten by sea creatures.

That ominous pattern reflects the plots of every season of The White Lotus. But unlike the credit sequence and the previous two instalments, the rest of this very slow-burn season doesn’t get to the danger nearly fast or vividly enough. A series should never move so slowly that it only begins to take off halfway through. The White Lotus still has writer and director Mike White’s fingerprints, and occasionally his iconoclasm and inventiveness. But this uneven iteration feels flabby and elongated, with far less satiric bite.

As before, this season starts with an unidentified corpse, after gunshots interrupt a meditation session with the resort’s so-called “health mentor”. So much for the Eastern spiritual calm some of the rich Western travellers might have hoped for. The story then flashes back a week as the guests arrive.

The show always skewers the ultrarich while heading toward the murder, so it makes sense that the most intriguing characters are a wealthy financial advisor and his family, even though the jabs at their privilege are toothless. Tim Ratliff finds himself in serious, predictable business trouble back home, but Jason Isaacs makes the character’s desperation visceral and urgent. His wife, Victoria (Parker Posey), is a one-note character always zonked out on anti-anxiety drugs. 

White’s astute casting often makes the season better than the story suggests, though, and the Ratliff children are especially well played. The middle child, earnest Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), has led the family to Thailand so she can research her college thesis on Buddhism, one of the few plot points that actually has to do with Thailand. The oldest son, Saxon, is a good-looking, sex-obsessed dolt. Patrick Schwarzenegger effectively channels the layers of this bro-guy whose hedonism comes back to bite him. Sam Nivola plays the youngest child, shy high-school senior Lochlan. If you get the unsettling sense that the sexual boundaries in this family are a little too loose, trust your instincts. White provides a twist that is both ick and proof that he hasn’t entirely lost his edge or willingness to plumb some dark psychology. The Ratliff brothers’ casting might seem to cry nepo-baby because Patrick is Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver’s son, and Nivola’s parents are Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer. But both are entirely natural and convincing, worth casting on their own.

In another smart, unexpected choice, Walton Goggins from Fallout plays the enigmatic Rick, whose garish shirts and unkempt appearance make him out of place at the resort. He seems to be some kind of grifter with a younger, put-upon girlfriend (Aimee Lou Wood). But for once Goggins is not asked to grin wildly, and becomes poignant when Rick’s ulterior motive is revealed – if you believe his story.

And Natasha Rothwell returns as Belinda, the spa manager in Maui in the first season, now in Thailand for job training in wellness. Rothwell has always made the character touching, with a sweet diffident smile that signals how little she expects from life. Here she is used mostly as a plot device, but it’s a clever plot full of call-backs to earlier seasons and too spoilery to detail. 

By far the weakest storyline involves three long-time friends on a girls’ trip. Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan and Leslie Bibb’s roles are shockingly cliched, including jealousy, gossip and a holiday fling with the help. Near the start, Coon gulps a whole glass of wine, typical of the mugging and telegraphing of characters in a thread that is meant to be the most comic but just seems stale. 

With so many possibilities, it’s disappointing that the show doesn’t use its setting well. It just cuts away to a shot of a monkey or a statue of a monkey now and then. And although the premise is full of built-in cultural and class differences, the Thai characters are marginal and shallow. Lalisa Manoban, better known as Lisa from the K-pop group Blackpink, plays Mook, a member of the wellness staff who has little to do except smile and flirt with the security guard at the resort’s entrance.

Some major themes come to the fore as the eight-episode season winds down, especially when Piper visits a Buddhist monastery. But by the end of episode six, the last one sent to critics, the season is still just an echo of the previous ones. A fourth season has already been ordered, so The White Lotus has a chance to right itself, but maybe not in Thailand.