What if a novel showed up on your doorstep, and you were not only a main character in it, but its villain? And what if copies of the book — which begins by noting that “any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence” — started appearing in the hands of everyone you knew and cared about?
That’s the nightmarish, addictive premise of Disclaimer, a new Apple miniseries adapted by writer-director Alfonso Cuarón (Roma) from the book by Renée Knight. Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker with a gilded lifestyle funded by her philanthropist husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen). Their son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a bit of a disappointment, who sells appliances at a department store while searching for a direction in life, but to the outsiders looking in — including to the coworkers whose jealousy she seems to feed off of — she’s got it all.
Then one day Catherine is stunned to receive a book, The Perfect Stranger, purporting to tell the story of an affair she had years before (she’s played in flashback by Leila George) with the much younger Jonathan Brigstocke (Jonathan Partridge), which ended with Jonathan’s accidental death. We know that the book’s author was Jonathan’s grieving mother Nancy (Lesley Manville). His bitter and lonely father Stephen (Kevin Kline) finds it while packing up Nancy’s things after she’s died of cancer, and decides to use the tome as part of an elaborate revenge plot against the women he holds responsible for the loss of both his son and his wife.
Cuarón wrote and directed all seven episodes. He does not take an understated approach to the material. The story takes place in multiple timelines, including the Italian holiday gone horribly wrong, the present-day game Stephen is playing, and Nancy struggling in the years immediately following Jonathan’s death. In addition to scenes presented as being part of Nancy’s book, we also get Stephen’s inner monologue, plus narration from actress Indira Varma, who is mostly there to scold Catherine in the second person. Cuarón works with a pair of acclaimed cinematographers, including his longtime collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki (who won the first of his three consecutive Oscars for Cuarón’s Gravity), plus Bruno Delbonnel (Amélie). Episodes feature many of Cuarón’s visual signatures (a single-take sequence inside a car, much like the famous one he and Lubezki did in Children of Men), but also some new bits of razzle-dazzle. The sequences out of The Perfect Stranger all begin and end with an iris shot, and the sky in most of the outdoor scenes is bathed in light so artificial-looking, some of it is practically a watercolor painting(*). And Cuarón invites Kevin Kline to chew every bit of scenery in sight, giving us both the doddering old man Stephen pretends to be in order to enact his plan and the gutted wreck who takes great glee in the opportunity to destroy Catherine.
(*) The use of color is stunning even in smaller ways. There’s a scene where Catherine has to speak to someone through the mail slot in their front door, so all we see of Blanchett for several minutes is her eyes, lit in a way that make them seem an almost unnaturally bright shade of blue.
All these layers of narration and timeline and visual bravura combine to serve as a constant reminder to question the nature of everything we’re seeing and feeling. As Catherine puts it while accepting an award, “Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth. But they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate.” We are used to believing the things we see in filmed stories, but should we? Stephen takes every word Nancy has written about Jonathan and Catherine’s assignation as gospel, never once stopping to wonder how she could know all the details of what their son and this stranger did together. This is all ultimately a fiction, even the “real” versions of Stephen and Catherine that we see in the present, but some fictions are nonetheless meant to be more trustworthy than others.
Kevin Kline in ‘Disclaimer.’
AppleTV+
Kline’s performance is, by design, the biggest and boldest, and tremendous fun much of the time. But even in a relatively small amount of screen time, the rawness of Manville’s performance hits like a thunderbolt. Though Blanchett and George are playing the same character at different ages, each of them in fact winds up playing multiple versions of Catherine, and Blanchett and George’s respective versions match to an uncanny degree, particularly in the story’s concluding chapters.
Does Disclaimer telegraph its plot and underline its thematic arguments at times? Yes. Are the characters deep enough to sustain seven episodes, many of them close to an hour in length? Not quite. But the plot hook, the performances, and the technical skill on display from Cuarón and his collaborators are so dazzling that you will, like everyone who gets a copy of The Perfect Stranger, find a hard time putting it down until you’ve reached the end.
The first two episodes of Disclaimer begin streaming October 11, with the next two following on October 18, and the last three releasing weekly until November 7. I’ve seen the whole thing.
