Amazon Prime Video’s Expats review: Nicole Kidman leads an excellent cast in sobering exploration of displacement and grief

Nicole Kidman plays Margaret, a sombre, visibly scarred woman living among Hong Kong’s elite expat community, in Expats on Prime Video. (Screen grab/YouTube/PrimeVideo)

Throughout the runtime of Prime Video’s Expats, news of the baffling disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 plays in the background. It’s never foregrounded or made an active participant of the narrative, but it clues you in on the timeline and the cultural backdrop of the show. The MH370 tragedy represents an inexplicable catastrophe still in search of closure. What if this despairing lack of closure was compressed and applied to human relationships? Expats is set among Hong Kong’s rich, disconnected and racist American families. Central to the show is a disappearance, and the grief that three women struggle to outgrow as a result. It’s gloriously performed, stunningly shot and studiously stretched as an affecting analysis of torment without the sight of a conclusion.

Nicole Kidman plays Margaret, a sombre, visibly scarred woman living among Hong Kong’s elite expat community. There are two timelines to the show. The pre-disappearance of her son Gus is the first, and the second takes place after the incident. The disappearance, though unprovocative in nature, exacts a particular toll on the people touched impacted by it. This includes Margaret’s friend Hilary, played by Sarayu Blue, and Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), a tomboyish Korean-American working odd-jobs to keep her head above water in cosmopolitan Hong Kong.

To the show’s focused purview, there is also the political backdrop of civic unrest against China’s growing control in the region. What does life look like in a place where identity itself is mutilated by political interpretation? Turns out it’s bridled by doubt, an air of desperation and a sense of detachment.

Margaret has given up her life and her career in the States to move to the region for her husband Clarke’s (Brian Tee) better-paying contractual project. There is this evident friction between the couple that doesn’t exactly translate into bursts of violence or aggression. Instead, it’s this understated worm of stress, doubt and conformity that quietly settles into Margaret’s head. She looks forlorn, subdued and a tad askew in the wider geometry of a bustling landscape. Her friend Hilary, significantly more composed but equally torn between worlds, represents another variant of this conflict. Perhaps the most interesting cue into Hong Kong’s culture of hustle and cut-throat competitiveness comes from Mercy’s everyday challenges. Yoo is exceptional as this persevering but ultimately naïve woman trying to survive the socio-economic jugglery of Hong Kong’s cultural axis.

Created by Lulu Wang, Expats is a dogged assessment of both settler cronyism and resident anxieties. Even though it focuses on elite immigrants, the show makes space for Hong Kong’s street-shaped realities, the political furnace beaming smoke out of its secretive tunnels.

Shot with great patience and style, the series has a film-like quality, the ability to casually sit in the distance and observe its performers rather than intrude upon them with enthusiasm and verbosity. The relationships feel real, their emotional tissue continually prodded by the elegant presence of someone who only wants to witness. We aren’t immediately told what happened, but the mystery of it all is merely the by-product of a show that is far more interested in the details of suffering, as the outcome of loss, and vice versa.

Wang’s authenticity shines through in a show that knows how to walk that tightrope in what is essentially a world set on the meeting point of conflicting, at times competing cultures. What shape does loss take within the intercutting lines of language, ideas, intent and greed? Moreover, how do you contend with loss without the sense of an ending? Sort of like the MH370 tragedy that hangs like this unformed shadow of a tragedy that is now stuck in the process of becoming; through the many people, lives, languages and cultures it has left unfinished. Gradually, Expats becomes about living with the fact of not knowing as opposed to the thrill of victoriously arriving at some sort of knowledge.

In the second episode of the show, the street that Gus disappeared on is exhibited through a montage of its many states from day through night. There are cacophonous gatherings with dizzying, vague decoration of colours, noise and unruly fabric. There is also the quiet, windless air of the night through which a body or two probably stumbles home. Then there is the morning when cleaners, garbage trucks and other municipal handlers turn this patch of land into something that looks fresh, reborn and unclaimed. It’s ultimately people who give streets their identity. But what if your only relationship with a street is tragedy; with a land, sorrow; and your own self, a sense of self-loathing? Expats is glum, visually arresting and pitch-perfect for the sobering exploration of anguish without the geographical shoulder of familiarity.

Expats is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video