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The Oscar-winning director’s usual flair is nowhere to be seen in this bloated Apple TV+ series, while star Cate Blanchett is wasted
2/5
Apple TV+ has quietly become the home of some of the best TV in the streaming age, but everything good comes with a disclaimer. Disclaimer’s disclaimer should be “Warning: may not be as good as it should be”. Five-time Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón writes and directs, Cate Blanchett stars alongside Sacha Baron Cohen and Kevin Kline, and Apple’s bottomless budgets ensure everything looks just so. And yet despite all that, Disclaimer is a bit of a stinker.
The story is adapted by Cuarón from Renée Knight’s 2015 book. It centres on Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett), an award-winning documentary-maker who one day receives a novel in the post, author unknown. It’s a fizzing roman à clef, with Catherine both the protagonist and the villain. Readers seem to agree that the woman in the novel is “a selfish bitch who deserves to die.” Catherine knows it’s her.
One of those readers is Catherine’s husband Robert (Baron Cohen), who promptly ups sticks when he works out that this is a chronicle of his wife’s past. But is it true? We jump between two timelines – the events of the book as they happened and the fallout in the present day – to find out. It’s revealed that the book was written by Nancy Brigstocke (Lesley Manville), who we only see in flashback: her death nine years ago has left her husband Stephen, a crotchety schoolteacher (Kline) subsumed in grief. So when he finds the manuscript in a desk drawer, dedicated to his and Nancy’s son Jonathan – now also deceased! – he vows revenge.
The pressing question that is supposed to sustain Disclaimer is what actually happened all those years ago between Catherine and Jonathan, when they met on holiday in Italy and sparks flew. But it is a question that is very quickly superseded in Disclaimer by a much greater imponderable: “Alfonso, what were you thinking?”
The show uses a second-person, omniscient narrator throughout, voiced by Indira Varma. It is meant to provide a point of difference from your common psychological thriller in which beautiful women look troubled while drinking wine in spectacular kitchens. But more often the narration is either confusing or redundant. Sometimes it’s inadvertently comical (“You think back to the day before when you almost told Robert everything. But you didn’t.”)
The infuriating voice-over is, unfortunately, all of a piece with a thriller that is at least thrilling – two stars for that – but is otherwise overwrought. The dialogue is hackneyed and the very, very long sex scenes smack of desperation. Cuarón has made a series of brilliant films including Roma, Gravity and Children of Men, but his earlier foray into television, 2014 fantasy drama Believe, was also panned by critics.
Disclaimer, too, should stand as a case study for the dangers of auteur bloat: too long, pretentious and with just a soupçon of naff, the suspicion is that no one had the power to tell the big-name signing to rein it in.
Disclaimer is on Apple TV+ now
Recommended
3/5
3/5
2/5
English