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

Mar. 15, 2025

Walton Goggins and Aimie Lou Wood in ‘The White Lotus’.Photo:Fabio Lovino/HBO

Fabio Lovino/HBO

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-writerMike White’s brilliant HBO series — will reverberate all the way back to the States.

It’sA Passage to Indiabut with anenormous castand direr consequences.

Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sarah Catherine Hook, and Sam Nivola in season 3 of ‘White Lotus’.Fabio Lovino/HBO

This isn’t a radical reworking of the formula established inLotus’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 seriesEnlightened, starringLaura Dern.

Lotuswas threatening to turn intoGroundhog Daywith 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.

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’twantto articulate? (Also: Does thinking along these lines makeyouwant to join a monastery?)

Carrie Coon, Leslie Bibb and Michelle Monaghan venture forth from the pampered security of the White Lotus hotel.HBO/ Warner Bros.

HBO/ Warner Bros.

A final retreat from the world works nicely enough in novels, fromThe Princess of ClevestoBrideshead 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,starringSalma 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 Lotusseason 3 premieres Feb. 16 at 9 p.m. on HBO.

source: people.com