An exclusive retreat only offered to certain people. A place to overcome past trauma and reconnect with your true self. No real understanding of how it works. Would you be willing to risk it?
The series follows a group of nine city folk who visit a wellness resort for a short visit of ten days. The resort is run by a Russian lady called Masha whose mission it is to rejuvenate their tired minds. The guests have all experienced different types of trauma that they are trying to heal from.
Initially there is reluctance from the guests as Masha presents unique experiences to heal their minds. For example, one of the exercises involves lying in your own grave, another involves violence against a dummy. The real issues begin once they come to realise that Masha has been microdosing them.
Microdosing is a term I hadn’t heard of before this show but basically it means taking tiny amounts of a drug to get it’s benefit with minimal side effects. As this is something experimental, the guests aren’t exactly happy especially given the fact they didn’t give their explicit consent.
As the series continues, we learn more about the guests paths and how they ended up in the retreat. We also learn a lot about Masha and her motives behind this place. In each episode, we learn a little bit more to allow us (the viewer) to put the pieces together. At the end of it though, the main question to be asked is do the ends really justify the means?
The main interest in this series comes from the mystery around all of the different characters. We have nine guests and the three main hosts. That’s a lot of character information to take in. The mystery comes from trying to understand Masha as it is clear from the beginning that something isn’t quite right.
The performances given by the cast is great, especially Nicole Kidman, Luke Evans, Mellisa McCarthy, Grace Van Patten and the rest. They are all fantastic and the emotion portrayed by all of the cast feels raw. A couple of times, I felt as if it were a real story. In a way, all of the characters could be real people.
The plot development at times feels slow, but it does keep you interested. It’s one of those shows that you could binge watch but if you were to leave it a couple of weeks, you’d forget about it. It seems that it was hard for the creators to keep up the pace and create the visuals that they wanted.
Endings can make or break a series and thankfully, the ending of this series answers all the questions you could want. It’s a feel good ending and feels like the story is complete. The only real negative is that it isn’t particularly memorable.
My Rating - 6.5/10