White Lotus Season 3 Review: Please Check in — We Guarantee You’ll Love Your Stay

What happens in Vegas is known to stay in Vegas. But what happens at the White Lotus hotel and spa outside Bangkok — the setting of the third season of director-writer Mike White’s brilliant HBO series — will reverberate all the way back to the States.

As in prior outings of The White Lotus, at least one guest stands a strong chance of going home in a casket (which at least means no jet lag). The other guests, just about all of them privileged and White, are due to get profoundly shaken up. Cosseted from sunup to sundown by a smiling staff, they’re freed from the horse’s harness of daily routine, only to misbehave (drugs, alcohol, guns and worse) and then suffer for it.

It’s A Passage to India but with an enormous cast and direr consequences. 

This isn’t a radical reworking of the formula established in Lotus' superb season 1, but season 3 is much more gripping than season 2. Those episodes took place in Sicily and felt, at times, like a mere retread. You worried that White had possibly got himself stuck and couldn't manage to push the show's concept any further dramatically, as he did in his acclaimed HBO series Enlightened, starring Laura Dern.

Lotus was threatening to turn into Groundhog Day with concierge service and heated bathroom floors.

This time, though, White does something that's more like endless, ingenious variations played on a theme: He’s HBO’s own little Mozart at the pianoforte. He finds a stronger narrative shape in the cultural divide between East and West, and he nimbly exploits the guests’ lazy isolation in a tropical paradise where (as you know from the start) violence will inevitably intrude—erupt. In addition to bringing back season 1’s spa manager Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), White also develops a plot thread, quietly sinister and diabolically inspired, that connects the entire run of the show.

Best of all, he’s created two memorable characters who, at least in the six of eight episodes provided for review, eclipse practically everyone else: Rick (Walton Goggins), an angry, desperate man who can’t resist touching an unhealed emotional wound, and his sweet, uncomprehending but ever-supportive lover Chelsea (Living’s Aimee Lou Wood, who has some of the transplendent quirkiness of the late Shelley Duvall). These two have a riveting dynamic, romantic yet unstable. They could have been spun off into their own series.

But that would have deprived you of the other guests, a funny-sad-snobby-muddled-disappointed lot who are smart enough to appreciate that money doesn't buy happiness. On the other hand, they might reason, that's no reason to live like Saint Francis, dressed in a filthy robe and preaching to birds.

Parker Posey is especially good as a homemaker, Violet Ratliff, who arrives with a cache of tranquilizers—these are soon being pilfered and swallowed by her husband, Timothy (Jason Isaacs), a businessman about to be exposed for fraud. When their daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) confesses that she wants to stay on in Thailand and study at a Buddhist monastery, Violet is appalled. "You could wind up a concubine with a bunch of sister-wives," she gasps, "getting branded!"

What remains to be seen is whether the show will suggest that, somehow, a week or so at the increasingly uncomfortable spa can lead to enlightenment (see above reference to Laura Dern) — or, at least, an escape for these guests from the hollow values of their lives. (The Lotus should have its own exclusively bookable therapist.) Is there really a spiritual sanctuary where any of them, including Piper, will be able to find shelter from the storm? Can anything ease the pain they can barely articulate — that they don't want to articulate? (Also: Does thinking along these lines make you want to join a monastery?)

A final retreat from the world works nicely enough in novels, from The Princess of Cleves to Brideshead Revisited, but White’s probing humor — bitterly ironic but also empathetic — doesn't typically offer consoling solutions. (Check out his startlingly harsh 2017 film, Beatriz at Dinner, starring Salma Hayek.) One Lotus guests mocks the hotel as “a Disneyland for rich bohemians from Malibu in their Lululemon yoga pants.” But it’s really a ship of fools, where first class isn’t much better than steerage.

The scramble for lifeboats will be ugly.

The White Lotus season 3 premieres Feb. 16 at 9 p.m. on HBO.