A quality cast – Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville – can’t save the dreck that is Apple TV+’s Disclaimer
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Sheesh! In the glut of prestige TV on the most prestigy of the current streaming services, Disclaimer could easily make a claim to be among the most prestigy-ish of them all. Written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón and starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, it oozes contemporary sophistication and a desire to be part of the cultural conversation. But in reality, it is little more than overly tricksy, baffingly plotted, award bait.
Based on the 2015 novel of the same name by Renée Knight, we open with Blanchett’s Catherine Ravenscroft, a documentary journalist receiving a major award but in the midst of her success, she receives a package containing a book entitled The Perfect Stranger. To her horror, it is a novel in which she appears as a main character and it covers a shocking incident from her past that she has desperately tried to keep hidden.
Its appearance is the work of Kline’s Stephen Brigstocke, a teacher who has just lost his job and whose wife has died of cancer (Lesley Manville’s Nancy). And what it covers is the death by drowning of their son Jonathan some twenty years on an Italian beach, strongly insinuating it was no straight-forward event. Stephen’s plans for revenge don’t stop there, as he also takes aim at Catherine’s marriage and family.
As a narrative about storytelling, Cuarón throws a lot at us. Non-linear timelines dip between the fateful Italian trip and the fallout of its revelation in contemporary London, unreliable narrators point to differently perceived versions of events coming into play, and a second-person narration device (silkily voiced as it is by Indira Varma) comes off as horrendously pretentious. It really is a lot but not in a good, or entertaining, way.
Matters aren’t helped by thoroughly unbelievable behaviour from so many of its characters. Sacha Baron Cohen’s husband Rob might be so desperately insecure as to be hoodwinked as he is but the way the world at large ‘believes’ the book leading to Catherine’s professional ruin is laughable, especially as Kline’s Stephen stagily overacts his deceptive decreptitude. By the time the ‘truth’ comes around, you struggle to care.
Leila George as the younger Catherine and Louis Partridge as Jonathan fare a little better in the sexy Italian sunshine, though saddled with the same archly problematic script that does its best to throw even Blanchett off her game. As she often does, Lesley Manville cuts through the crap with some incisive work, her raw grief as Nancy bracing and as she’s dead for most it, she gets away without having to explain the inexplicable. Best avoided.
