A film with an impeccable reputation, Disclaimer was written and directed by Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Roma) and starred Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Lesley Manville.
However, no amount of artistic skill can save this seven-part series, which succeeds when it embraces its pulpier tendencies but foolishly chooses to point the finger at anyone who could have appreciated its more thriller-like elements in its table-turning finale.
It’s a serious error made worse by a convoluted and occasionally absurd plot. Even though it isn’t as good as it could be, Kline gives a delicious performance as a man on a very cunning kind of mission.
Disclaimer, which premieres on Apple TV+ on October 11 and is based on Renée Knight’s 2015 novel, begins with Christiane Amanpour praising documentarian Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett) at a gala. This is an instant (albeit inadvertent by Cuarón) indication of her journalistic unreliability. Though she is commended for exposing “our own complicity in some of today’s most toxic sins,” it turns out that former private school teacher Stephen Brigstocke (Kline) thinks Catherine has committed a horrible crime.
After years of mourning the loss of their twentysomething son Jonathan (Louis Partridge), Stephen is now dealing with the recent death of his wife Nancy (Manville). He finds the key to the locked drawer in the desk she used in Jonathan’s bedroom after he donates her clothing to a charity. He finds “The Perfect Stranger,” a text devoted to Jonathan that states that “any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.
In the first several episodes of Disclaimer, the action is split between the third-person narrators of Stephen and Indira Varma as well as flashbacks (shown by opening and closing iris shots) to Jonathan and his fiancée Sasha’s trip to Italy.
The youthful, flirtatious couple in these scenes come across as unbearable, thus Sasha’s sudden return home is not a huge loss. Her departure serves as the impetus for Jonathan and a young Catherine (Leila George) to meet for the first time in the series; their encounter is also the focus of “The Perfect Stranger.” Stephen starts a Machiavellian scheme to ruin Catherine’s personal and professional lives by self-publishing the book and secretly delivering it to Catherine, her charity bigwig husband Robert (Cohen), and their gloomy, indolent son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who is estranged from his mother for unknown reasons.
While his script’s drama fluctuates from natural to creaky—the latter being the case with the majority of sequences involving Jonathan or Nicholas—Cuarón’s flexible camerawork moves in sync with his characters’ continual mobility as they converse and quarrel while navigating personal and professional settings. Thankfully, he has two excellent leads.
The arrival of “The Perfect Stranger” and, more damningly, a set of images that seem to support the unpleasant events in the book undermine the confidence of Blanchett’s Catherine, a truth-teller with a good reputation. Even when the show makes her problem worse by keeping her from doing the few things that would stop it in its tracks, the actor, who is removing her character’s self-assurance layer by layer, radiates sympathetic vulnerability.
Readers of “The Perfect Stranger” agree that the main female character is a terrible “b—h,” and the book is widely read. This character, who is based on Catherine, is obviously offended by this and ultimately concludes that Stephen is the one responsible for the disastrous plan. After grounding his widower’s actions in heavy sadness, Kline presents him as a sinister plotter who is out to get revenge on the filmmaker for her transgressions and is prepared to utilize his advanced age—or rather, adopt an overly aged demeanor and speech—to further his objectives. The well-known actor makes a brilliantly sly role that is both humorous and crafty, making it simple to support Stephen in giving Catherine the retribution she seems to so well deserve.
However, Disclaimer favors Stephen so much from the beginning that it’s hard to avoid expecting a late revelatory switcharoo. The affair becomes a moralistic lecture about, well, exposing that would ruin the show’s climax surprises when that expectation is unavoidably fulfilled. However, it should be noted that Catherine is not all that Stephen portrays her as being, and that the account of events given in flashbacks could not be entirely accurate.
Cuarón frames his work as an exploration of the essence of storytelling, sandwiched between Stephen’s shocking book and Catherine’s literary narration. However, despite its initial allure, that worry is brought up in a story that is unsure about whether it intends to suspensefully delight, as it does in its middle sections, or merely scold, as is the case with its conclusion.
Kline is so likeable that he manages to keep the show on course by himself, whether he’s rubbing his hands together like a master villain or feigning to toss a bomb over his shoulder (complete with a quiet “kaboom” sound).
A few of its twists come across as unexpected and overly convenient, such as Nicholas’ covert habit of going to places he most definitely shouldn’t. Disclaimer frequently spends more time on incidents than they need to, giving the impression that it’s stretching things out to fit a streaming-TV template. Often torn between being a genre potboiler and a sobering analysis of trauma, snap decisions, cancel culture, and trust, Kline handles it all with endearing grace—at least until the action starts.
A character-assassination story may make Catherine the protagonist, but the more it progresses, the more Disclaimer reduces her to a tool that sends a tsk-tsk message about who and what we choose to believe. If the series hadn’t been blatantly rigged from the beginning and didn’t require so many leaps of faith to make its point, that might have succeeded. Instead of genuinely surprising audiences, it wastes Kline’s much-needed comeback to the A-list spotlight by giving them the most predictable and unimpressive shocks possible.