James Y. Lee
The following review contains spoilers for the entirety of Disclaimer on Apple TV+. This review also discusses scenes of sexual assault and violence. Reader discretion is advised.
There are a handful of moments that ominously indicate that Alfonso Cuarón’s miniseries, Disclaimer, might not live up to the promises of the director behind it. Ominously, I say, because for anyone who knows anything about Cuarón, those promises are grandiosely moving, deeply stirring, and worth profound anticipation. This is the man behind the likes of Children of Men, Gravity, and Roma, the director who’s offered sweeping visions of humanity through tales of profound spectacle, regardless of if his stories are being told in the vast cold of space or the historically situated domesticity of 1970s Mexico City. With that in mind, however, the first sign of trouble comes in the source material of Disclaimer, a novel by Renée Knight that Cuarón elected to adapt and write in its entirety throughout all seven episodes. Indeed, this is not quite a sweeping vision of humanity amid spectacle, but instead an aesthetic near-opposite—an intertwining, talkative, plotted-out and interpersonal series of enclosed narratives.
Then, the next sign of trouble: an early thematic thesis, if you will, of what’s to come over the course of Disclaimer‘s seven episodes, which reads more like a warning to the audience over time. “Beware of narrative and form,” the host of the Royal Television Society’s awards ceremony warns, right on the heels of bestowing a major honor to documentarian Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) for her explorations of the truth when it comes to interrogating structures of power. But some kind of damning, dangerous narrative about Catherine is about to be unveiled at the hands of Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), who’s publishing a novel titled The Perfect Stranger, a thin fictionalization of the events through which Catherine may have been responsible for the death of his son, Jonathan (Louis Partridge), written in a manuscript by Stephen’s late wife, Nancy (Lesley Manville), while she was terminally ill.
We’ve seen multiple kinds of tales-not-to-be-trusted like this before, stretching all the way back to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon codifying itself as one of that particular canon’s progenitors. But where the best of those kinds of subversive narratives lie—in the intriguing, constantly surprising, unexpectedly productive delivery of information—Disclaimer instead chooses to operate in the most obvious, basic terms. Look no further than the most persistent sign of trouble that lasts all throughout this series: grating, uninteresting, boring volleys of pompously written narration whose illuminating intentions are completely marred by the fact that they sound more like lines slothfully grafted directly from the book.
For a show that purports its intentions to withhold key details about the characters’ narratives, this narration is the first major omen that things throughout Disclaimer are perhaps far more easy to parse than they could possibly seem. The show presents us with three distinct timelines over the course of its winding narrative—Jonathan’s trip to Italy and a literally fateful fling and affair he forms with a younger Catherine (Leila George); Stephen’s burgeoning quest for vengeance after losing Jonathan and his wife Nancy; and the deterioration of Catherine’s reputation following the publication of The Perfect Stranger. Every single one of these threads, even despite a miniseries’ runtime worth of potential to explore them and their ramifications, are presented in the most glaringly crystal-clear way, removing any possibility of nuance or ambiguity that might add the right amount of intrigue and spice to the way these stories interact.
These threads frequently unfold with absolutely comical amounts of caricaturization. For one, Catherine’s thread of her deteriorating reputation is nothing remotely exceptional. Blanchett has already played this kind of role before in Todd Field’s Tár, where her portrayal of the downfall of Berlin Philharmonic chief conductor Lydia Tár unfolds with far more inquiry, thought, curiosity, and ambiguity than whatever happens to Catherine after The Perfect Stranger gets published. In that film, we get a sense of the world that Blanchett’s character exists in—the epochal institutions that allow her character to reign unchecked in the status she’s in now, and what happens when modernity catches up to gradually make her far more trouble than she’s worth.
But in Disclaimer, Cuarón is far less interested in the fragile narrativized intersections of power and modernity than he is in straightforwardly depicting the glib occurrences that so frequent modern instances of cancel culture. Assumptions of guilt until proven innocence, online virality following a spurious act of impulsive violence, the destruction of career prospects—the list continues on, with nothing more to supplement it. It’s not hard to surmise that Indira Varma’s occasional second-person narration delving into Catherine and Robert’s psyches is certainly an attempt at finding something to support and enhance what’s already being seen of those two characters. However, virtually everything she utters is a reasonable inference that any viewer worth their salt can make from what’s already visible about them.
The scheme that Stephen devises to cause this aforementioned cancellation is one of the show’s most unintentional sources of hilarity. His quest for vengeance against Catherine feels less motivated by an unmooring degree of overwhelming grief, and more by a slasher-esque quantity of sadism designed to spoonfeed the next five generations of Machiavellian aspirants for decades to come. His plans are laid out with narration in his voice explicating in hilarious detail exactly how he wants to make Catherine and her entire family suffer as painfully as possible. Every so often, those voice-overed plans are also underlaid by menacing Bach music hailing the omnipresence of the Lord our God, as if the point had somehow been conveyed in a woefully coy and insufficient manner beforehand. Every single time he successfully deceives someone in Catherine’s periphery, he can barely hide a sinister smirk while fist-pumping just slightly for it to register as a tic to anyone who may notice. At that point, it becomes a shame that he doesn’t simply don a black top hat, fit a monocle on his face, and grow out his mustache to suitably twirl-able length.
Oh, and make them suffer he does. Stephen releases apparent photographic evidence of Catherine’s affair with Jonathan—in the form of nude photos of her younger self taken by Jonathan—to Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen), Catherine’s husband, who proceeds to undergo a paranoiac break over the fidelity of their marriage thus far. He forms a fake Instagram account of Jonathan to reveal the truth to Catherine’s son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), whose emotional estrangement from Catherine is revealed in no greater depth than his enjoyment of rebellious hip-hop and a worsening drug habit. Stephen seeks out Catherine’s ambitious assistant, Ji-soo (Hoyeon), giving her a copy of The Perfect Stranger for her to confront and supplant Catherine with under claims of harassment. All the while, he ignores the fact that Nancy had taken significant creative liberties with the facts of the events leading up to Jonathan’s death while writing The Perfect Stranger, something that Stephen glibly justifies with boastful, pretentious glee by declaring it a necessity to her “artistic process,” aligning her with the likes of all great writers. (That, by the way, is an absolutely mind-boggling statement unironically uttered by a now-disillusioned former literature teacher who worked for decades at an educational institution.)
So what did actually happen with Jonathan? Firstly, his girlfriend, Sasha (Liv Hill), didn’t leave early from their trip to Italy together because her aunt suddenly died, as Nancy “recounts”; she left early because of a fight with Jonathan that forced her to get out of the country as soon as possible. Secondly, Catherine, whose younger self in this particular timeline is depicted as a nigh-pornographic succubus in human flesh, didn’t manipulate and seduce Jonathan repeatedly while neglecting a young Nicholas; Jonathan violently broke into her hotel room and sexually assaulted her for hours at knifepoint, taking photos of her body to fetishistically taunt her. The only consistent thing between the actual events as Catherine remembers them and Nancy’s “recollection” of them in The Perfect Stranger is that Jonathan died drowning while saving Nicholas at a beach, but even then, Stephen chooses to frame that as Catherine cruelly disposing of Jonathan by letting him die in the water, rather than Catherine wanting to rid herself of the vile rapist she was sure would haunt her for years to come.
If nothing else, Nancy should have been the focus of this story towards the end. Yes, not Stephen, not Catherine, but Nancy, the true architect of Catherine’s pain, the catalyst for Stephen’s comically villainous descent into madness, and above all else, the author of the very manuscript that kickstarts this entire chain of disaster. But when Disclaimer reaches its conclusion of Catherine’s reconciliation with Nicholas, and Stephen’s acceptance of the actual truth, we see no reevaluation of Nancy, no real insight into the pain she suffered, the pain that Jonathan may have suffered under her, and the pain she intended to enact on Catherine that Stephen extended to ludicrous dimensions. For how significant her role is in the textual foundation of Disclaimer‘s series of events, she isn’t given a penny’s worth of her due, made only an afterthought within the scope of the story that Cuarón deems significant.
There are ideas at play here that demand a more productive vision, a more focused sense of direction, namely about the ways that women’s narratives are continually misrepresented and over-sexualized, where other people’s control over their narratives subjugates their identities and serves as a sinister form of oppression and violence. But so many of the series’ utterly baffling creative choices render these points moot and counterintuitive. When the moment of truth arrives for Catherine to reveal the horrific nature of her encounter with Jonathan, Cuarón makes the structurally disorienting decision to place it at the final episode of the series, making it so that the audience is less anticipating the reveal and more impatiently waiting for its vastly overdue arrival. A grand total of nearly six episodes are focused on the rampant sexualization of Catherine’s past, who’s, again, rendered a comically over-seductive caricature in those episodes’ depictions of her “fling” with Jonathan, hardly even neglectful or abusive towards Nicholas in the first place. That caricaturization, which this series’ intent is to eventually counteract, persists for so long to a point where, even if one could reasonably parse how wrong it all is, the tension of its inaccuracy evaporates beneath the exhaustion of how voyeuristically extended it becomes.
To that point, rendering this story a miniseries was likely a mistake of its own. It pads and extends events by way of repeated narrative beats, dragging out scenes that could have suitably ended minutes ago, and misusing its cast on characters that have nothing surprising to offer. That is something that a more condensed form of storytelling could have compensated for instead of counterintuitively emphasizing by way of incessant repetition.
At least throughout its length, Disclaimer looks utterly gorgeous, a reminder of Cuarón’s technical proficiency, and a testament to the cinematographic mastery of Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel, paired with excellent production design that provides a rich diversity of settings. But much like how Disclaimer wants to concern itself with false narratives, veneers, and appearances, it suffers from the same diseased, superficial syndrome it intends to critique and expose. When Disclaimer warns you to beware narrative and form, believe it. Its warning is, in fact, self-directed, an omen of how its manipulations of the truth are bound to be tragically misrepresentative of the depth it aspires to plumb.
