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Spoilers follow for Saint X.
20 years ago, American teenager Alison was found dead on the last day of their family’s vacation on the Caribbean island of Saint X. While two local men were initially considered suspects, her death was officially ruled an accident—although that didn’t stop the story from dominating the news. In the present, Alison’s younger sister Emily is catapulted back into the past when she encounters Clive, one of the men who was originally linked to Alison’s death, and she becomes obsessed with finding out what really happened.
Thus begins Saint X, the gripping new Hulu series which encapsulates two current pop culture obsessions: the ins and outs of life at the resorts frequented by wealthy white tourists à la The White Lotus, and the ubiquity of true crime content surrounding unsolved deaths, especially when the victim is a young white woman.
In fact, the themes that run through each episode of Saint X are so close to the bone that some viewers are starting to believe that the show was inspired by real events, and that “Saint X” might be a fictitious stand-in for a real place.
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Saint X is not technically based on a true story. But it’s complicated.
The series is actually an adaptation of the 2020 novel Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin, and largely follows the same plot, although some tweaks have been made to the structure: while the novel flits between Emily and Clive’s respective points of view, the show goes back and forth between Clive’s childhood, the week of the vacation leading up to Alison’s death, and the present day.
Although the characters and events depicted in Saint X are entirely fictional, there are some parallels with a well-known unsolved true crime story: the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, an 18-year-old college student who went missing while on vacation in Aruba. Holloway was declared legally dead by a judge in 2012, although her body has never been found, and to this day what happened to her remains a mystery.
The ending of Schaitkin’s book, whether intentionally or not, also echoes this unknown: Emily never finds out what really happened to her sister, and the novel’s resolution focuses instead on the emotional fallout of Alison’s death and the impact it had on both Emily and Clive throughout the rest of their lives.
Philip Ellis is a freelance writer and journalist from the United Kingdom covering pop culture, relationships and LGBTQ+ issues. His work has appeared in GQ, Teen Vogue, Man Repeller and MTV.
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