#‘Saint X’ Review: Hulu’s Adaptation of Acclaimed Alexis Schaitkin Novel Comes Up Short

In a moment of emotional crisis, Alison (West Duchovny) blurts out the suspicion that’s been weighing on her to a stranger in the bathroom: “Am I generic?” she sobs. And though the stranger assures her that she’s not, Saint X takes a more nuanced view.

In premise, the series would seem to be a fairly standard take on the dead-white-girl narrative, with Alison’s eventual unexplained death serving as the mystery at the heart of the plot. But as with the 2020 Alexis Schaitkin novel it’s based on, it upends those tropes by offering a kaleidoscope of perspectives that reconsider what kind of stories we expect from tragedies like these, and who gets to be at their center — or it aims to, anyway. Unfortunately, an accumulation of minor fumbles leaves what could’ve been an incisive subversion of a familiar story feeling, instead, more like a replication of it.

Adapted for TV by Leila Gerstein, Saint X unfolds primarily across two timelines. In the early 2000s, the Thomases — dad Bill (Michael Park), mom Mia (Betsy Brandt), 7-year-old Claire (Kenlee Anaya Townsend) and 18-year-old Alison — descend upon the titular island for a week of family fun, only to have their dream vacation turn into a nightmare when Alison goes missing the night before their scheduled return to Westchester. Meanwhile, in the 2020s, Claire — now going by Emily, and played by Alycia Debnam-Carey — happens one night to get into a cab driven by Clive Richardson (Josh Bonzie), one of the men suspected but never convicted of killing Alison. In the months that follow, she begins to stalk him and then to worm her way into his life, increasingly consumed by the idea that only he can give her the answers about her sister that have so long eluded her.

Of its two halves, Saint X fares far better in its resort material. Though its depiction of the titular island lacks the rich detail that made Schaitkin’s version leap off the page, it benefits from a curiosity about the supporting characters that surround the central players. It also displays a bracing willingness to dive into the uncomfortable conversations about race, class and sex raised by the uneven dynamic between the privileged tourists and the hotel staffers catering to their every need — piña coladas and towels, but also the thrill of a flirtatious smile or the ego boost of an effusive compliment. Dee Rees (Pariah), who helmed the first episode, shows a firm grasp of a perspective that flip-flops between the guests and the help, and an eye for silent but loaded glances that pass among or between them.

The queen of the tourist set is Alison, played by Duchovny with an insouciant drawl that makes the character somehow seem as if she’s always snapping her gum, even though she’s never actually chewing gum. Beautiful and outgoing, Alison tends to inspire adoration, desire, resentment or a combination thereof in the people she meets.

She’s also, we quickly learn, deeply insecure and maddeningly oblivious — a white girl so determined to prove she’s not like the other white guests that she cannot see how that very instinct makes her just another clueless white person. On the bus ride in, she loudly castigates her parents for the “hypocrisy” of booking a luxury vacay on “an island where people don’t even have solid roofs over their heads.” It’s not until the driver replies with a mild “Miss, on our island, the people are well fed and happy,” that she even seems to consider whether she’s projecting her own condescending assumptions onto a people and a place she doesn’t know at all.

Her ultimate effort to get an “authentic” experience out of her resort trip is her romantic pursuit of Clive’s charismatic best friend Edwin (a luminous Jayden Elijah). But if Edwin sees through Alison’s pretensions (“She’s the funniest whitey you’ve landed yet. So earnest. So self-important,” his friend laughs after witnessing one of their interactions), he has his own reasons for courting her affections, to be revealed gradually over the season’s eight hourlong chapters. Still, the plain fact that Edwin and Clive were among the last people seen with Alison will cast an air of suspicion around them long after the local police chief has ruled her death an accident, much in the way that grief continues to dog Emily decades after Alison’s passing.

In Emily and Clive, Saint X serves up two characters whose lives were completely derailed by Alison’s death, and understandably cannot help but be haunted by the questions and regrets that have hung over them ever since. (Clive’s sometimes manifest as a goat woman who stalks his nightmares, in an unnecessary detour into full-on horror.) But where scenes set in the past take care to flesh out the characters beyond their present predicaments — with, for instance, frequent flashbacks to formative moments from Edwin and Clive’s childhood — the present-day sequences feel artless in their singlemindedness. Clunky dialogue and overbearing music cues take Saint X from “downmarket White Lotus” to “downmarket Law & Order: SVU.”

“I’m going to make him trust me. Like he made her trust him,” Emily announces in one of the show’s more groaningly obvious lines. But the queasy chemistry between Clive and Emily is undermined by the series’ disinterest in fleshing out either beyond the scars left behind the night Alison died. Bonzie gives perhaps Saint X‘s most moving performance as the older Clive, a man so beaten down by despair that he moves through his own life like a ghost. Yet the need to obscure what he really got up to that night necessarily keeps him at a distance for most of the series. Debnam-Carey, meanwhile, does a fine job of modulating Emily’s gradual deterioration, but is too often reduced to yelling variations on the same ideas about how nothing matters but finding out how Alison died.

Her obsessive search for answers would seem to be a commentary on the way stories like Alison’s tend to be consumed and what we expect to get from them. And Saint X does, eventually, land on a definitive answer that feels thoughtfully, deliberately anticlimactic. With its very last scene, which has nothing to do with Alison at all, the series aims to shift our understanding of what kind of story we’ve been watching all along. But it feels like a little too little, a little too late. This turns out to be a story centered first and foremost around Alison — and while it may not be entirely as generic as Alison fears herself to be, it doesn’t manage to escape the confines of its genre, either.