In any good mystery series that withholds its answers until the end, our investment depends on the depth of the characters and their lives outside of the revelations to come. There may be a spectacular conclusion that changes everything we expected, but it is nothing without a basis that makes us worry. At the moment when all the cards are on the table, the weight of the impact depends on all the surrounding details.
In Saint X, Hulu's new adaptation of Alexis Schaitkin's novel of the same name, we almost did it. Through the story of an alleged murder across two timelines, the lead up and the aftermath many years later, his emotional focus sadly bifurcates and ultimately dissipates due to this scattering. Despite some strong episodes that take us deeper into the lives of the characters struggling with loss, Saint X remains a series that never gets as deep as it should by looking to the past rather than the deeper storytelling potential of the future.
Creator: Leila Gerstein
Stars: Alycia Debnam-Carey, Melissa Juliet Lawson, Amy Gordon
The driving force behind this, at least initially, is the troublesome Emily. Played by a committed Alycia Debnam-Carey, best known for her role on the series Fear the Walking Dead, she had stepped in for Victoria Pedretti, who previously joined the project and left the project due to reported creative differences. Without reading any of these changes and just evaluating the end result, Debnam-Carey is competent in the role, but she's left with less and less substance to work with. Currently, she is dealing with the tragic loss of her sister Alison (West Duchovny), which took place when she was a little girl vacationing in the Caribbean with her family.
Early flashbacks hide the precise way she died or who may have been behind her, leaving Emily with many unanswered questions that have begun to plague her once again. This may sound like your run-of-the-mill murder mystery, but there's a lot that soon sets Saint X apart. In addition to taking plenty of accurate shots of the way true crime turns tragedy into entertainment, it also examines who gets caught up in this case. and how it forever altered the course of their lives. This promising aspect is unfortunately lost.
In particular, it is the character of Clive (Josh Bonzie) that we get to know the most about. A staff member at the resort where Emily and her family had stayed is caught up in the aftermath of the inciting incident. Precise details about this incident, including the discovery of the deceased Alison, what ends up happening to Clive after this, and how his life will intertwine with Emily's once more years later in the cold concrete landscape of New York. in spoiler territory. What can be said is that Bonzie is the best actor in the entire series, giving life to a character who has basically been beaten by everyone on suspicion that he had something to do with Alison's disappearance. The series correctly acknowledges that this is related to Emily's and her family's personal biases, as well as a tourism system that draws much from the locals like a discount version of The White Lotus. Where it gets weird is when the series leaves out Clive, who honestly should have been the main character, and also makes inarguable observations that falter in giving validation to undeserving surface anxieties.
Early on, when Emily goes to a therapy appointment, the therapist asks her if her recent move to a Caribbean neighborhood of hers is getting too much for her. The basis for this question is that because she believes that someone on the resort staff may have been involved in her sister's death, somehow all these other people of similar ancestry may be triggers in some way. It's, to put it lightly, a rather insulting implication that the series appears to be skeptical to the contrary, albeit in far too hackneyed ways. As Emily almost begins to stalk Clive, tricking him about who she is in hopes of getting answers about what he knows, she begins to grow closer to him when she learns of her own struggles.
For all the ways the series is hyper-aware of narrative tropes, her fatal flaw lies in how she filters so much of the story through one character discovering the humanity of another whom she had written off. Where more incisive work like the recent film Nanny avoided this uninteresting framing, Saint X falls more and more into its traps despite all the ways he tries to stay away from them. The reason that movie comes to mind when watching this series is that each one plays with horror elements.
Watch Saint X 2023 Tv Series Trailer
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