Women are at war with their husbands, children at war with their parents, and men at war with themselves in Expats, the ambitious new miniseries on Prime Video, created and directed by Lulu Wang. The director burst onto the scene with her masterful 2019 film The Farewell, a semi-autobiographical drama about a young American woman reconnecting with her Chinese roots over a short trip to the mainland.
Based on the novel by Janice YK Lee, Expats provides a peek inside the (privileged) lives of several similarly unmoored characters, as they struggle to hold on to their identities in contemporary Hong Kong — a melting pot of cultures currently experiencing major upheaval. Wang doesn’t ignore the political backdrop against which this story of deception and despair is set, as she weaves a compelling human drama around a rather pulpy plot that revolves around the disappearance of a small child. Often, Expats feels like it’s in conflict with itself, juggling two tonally disparate narratives — a delicate story about grief and forgiveness, and a thriller not unlike Big Little Lies, with which it shares star and executive producer Nicole Kidman.
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Kidman plays Margaret, a wealthy American woman who lives with her husband and their children in a fancy apartment complex. Her neighbour is Hilary, an Indian-American trapped in a loveless marriage to an Englishman named David. Uniting Margaret and Hilary through the most unfortunate of circumstances is Mercy, a young Korean-American running away from her past by taking up odd jobs in Hong Kong.
At a boat party one day, Mercy’s easy bond with Margaret’s kids gets her hired as their babysitter. Soon afterwards, they go shopping at a night market, where Margaret leaves the youngest of her three children, Gus, in Mercy’s care. But due to a momentary lapse in concentration, Gus wiggles away from Mercy, and is instantly consumed by the sea of humanity around them. This is the show’s inciting incident in many ways, but Wang shows it only in episode two. Expats takes a Big Little Lies approach in episode one, setting up scandalous interpersonal dynamics and then working its way backwards.
Why, for instance, is there a wall between Margaret and Hilary? Why does Margaret recoil in shock the second she lays eyes on Mercy at a fancy cocktail party? And why does her husband, Clarke, break down in tears on his own birthday? It’s all a little camp, admittedly. But the tone shifts in episode two, yanking the high drama back down to earth. By the time the show’s standout episode — number five — rolls around, you’re hooked. This is what Wang is building towards. At an hour and 40 minutes long, and framed in a more cinematic aspect ratio, episode five offers not only a more grounded narrative, but also a shift in perspective.
It’s presented through the point-of-view of several house maids who were until then only background players. These characters are expatriates as well, having landed in Hong Kong from countries like the Philippines and Malaysia, with a fraction of the resources that their bosses came with. A lot of Margaret’s angst stems from her children’s growing attachment to their help, Essie; this is what prompts her to hire Mercy in the first place. She can’t bear the guilt of having done so, and Essie can’t help but imagine if Gus would still be safe had she been looking after him that evening instead of Mercy. It’s a suitably complex scenario, which Wang pulls off deftly. But despite the platitudes that Margaret and Hilary shower their helps with — and they do this quite often — the invisible wall between them is always apparent.
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These are emotionally caged characters, and often, the show dramatises their inner turmoil by trapping them inside physical spaces. Almost an entire episode, for instance, is dedicated to Hilary and her visiting Punjabi mother locked inside a lift, forced to unpack past trauma over a box of ‘pinnis’. We learn that Hilary is actually Harpreet Kaur, and that she hasn’t forgiven her abusive father for the violence that he inflicted upon her mom. Hilary discovered makeup not as a teenager, but as a four-year-old forced to mask her mother’s bruises. Margaret, on the other hand, is essentially locked inside her own home with the pastor that her husband has come to rely on following Gus’ tragic disappearance. She’s initially dismissive of religion, but grows to evolve over the evening that she spends with the pastor, himself an expat, as torrential rain restricts him from leaving.
These scenes are compellingly written, if a little contrived. But all it takes is a few minutes to become acclimatised to the tone that Wang is aiming for, a tone that she manages to nail for six gripping episodes.
Expats
Director – Lulu Wang
Cast – Nicole Kidman, Sarayu Blue, Ji-young Yoo, Brian Tee, Jack Huston, Ruby Ruiz
Rating – 4/5
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