Disclaimer feels like a direct response to the way studios have grown skittish about producing bona fide erotic thrillers aimed squarely at adults. Though the Apple TV Plus series is a cinematic delight and its lead performances are tremendous, its raw sexuality is what makes it seem like writer / director Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men) is trying to get you into a very specific kind of headspace. But what’s brilliant about Disclaimer is the way it uses its sensuality to complicate your read on its wild puzzle box mystery.
Based on Renée Knight’s 2015 novel, Disclaimer tells the story of Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), a respected journalist whose life begins to unravel after she receives a copy of a strange manuscript titled “The Perfect Stranger.” After Catherine’s years of exposing the shady secrets of powerful people with her documentaries, there are plenty of people who might want their revenge. But as Catherine pages through “The Perfect Stranger,” it becomes very obvious that the person behind it — retired teacher Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline) — somehow knows things about her that no one could ever be privy to.
It’s not just that “The Perfect Stranger” gets into Catherine’s personal life; it recounts with stunning clarity a specific summer from 20 years in the past when she (portrayed in flashback by Leila George) first met Stephen’s 19-year-old son Jonathan (Louis Partridge) while vacationing with her own young son. Despite Catherine having kept her affair with Jonathan secret from her husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen), the manuscript describes in vivid detail every single one of the lovers’ trysts. And with Jonathan having died under mysterious circumstances that same summer, Stephen’s assertion that he blames Catherine for the death and plans to publish the book leaves her blood running cold.
As Catherine’s fear shifts her into investigative reporter mode and she sets out to stop Stephen, Disclaimer leans further into its premise by narrating its story from a perspective that gives you insight into how “The Perfect Stranger” impacts the people who receive pieces of it. Seeing so many of her darkest secrets spelled out in plain text sends Catherine into an internal panic that’s decidedly at odds with the veneer of normalcy she puts on for Robert and their emotionally distant son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee). And after picking up on a change in his wife, Robert can’t help but feel fear and confusion of his own when he starts receiving risque photos of her from Stephen in the mail.
Viewed through one lens, Disclaimer reads as a psychological drama about an elderly stalker terrorizing a woman as a way to deal with the grief of losing his family. That’s the story Disclaimer presents as it zooms in on Stephen’s life in the present where he reminisces about his son and late wife Nancy (Lesley Manville). But Cuarón paints an increasingly complicated picture of what’s truly going on with each of the show’s beatific flashbacks to the sundrenched summer Catherine has tried to put behind her.
Disclaimer leaves you to differentiate between fact and fiction as it hops between timelines to carefully illustrate how people’s perceptions of reality are shaped by stories they tell themselves. There’s never any question that Catherine is hiding secrets that Robert wants to hurt her with, but Cuarón invites you to consider how a book like “The Perfect Stranger” — one full of such closely guarded information — could have been written by someone who wasn’t there when it all went down. It’s an obvious question that feels like the sort of thing someone might bring up immediately in the face of having their lives turned upside down by a surprise exposé. But Cuarón dramatizes the book’s scandalous contents in a way that, when coupled with the show’s utterly gorgeous cinematography from Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel, emphasizes the power stories have to influence the way we understand other people.
Kline and Manville both shine with tragically wrenching performances that sell the all-consuming hopelessness Jonathan’s death brought into the Brigstockes’ lives. But Disclaimer truly revolves around Blanchett and George, whose two iterations of Catherine feel subtly distinct at first blush, yet uncannily similar as the series’ seven episodes unfold. You’re meant to wonder how much of the gap between present-day Catherine’s steeliness and her past self’s ethereal airiness is just a function of time changing people or whether that difference speaks to something more sinister that she’s desperately trying to keep hidden.
The largeness with which sex looms in Disclaimer’s story makes the show feel distinct among Apple TV Plus’ other recent offerings. But rather than existing just to titillate you, Cuarón uses the show’s erotic edge to make a point about the danger of becoming fixated on the intimate details of other people’s lives. You’re supposed to gawk at Jonathan and Cather’s dalliances in the past the same way everyone who comes into possession of “The Perfect Stranger” finds themselves poring over the book’s contents.
Conclusions are meant to be drawn from the way Disclaimer shows you who Catherine and Jonathan were to each other because Cuarón is trying to get you, like his characters, to build a story about them in your mind. But by the series’ final episode, Disclaimer’s drama metamorphizes in a way that’s designed to leave you reeling and thinking about how malleable the truth can really be.
Disclaimer also stars HoYeon Jung, Liv Hill, Gemma Jones, Anya Marco Harris, Archie George, and Youssef Kerkour. The show’s first two episodes hit Apple TV Plus on October 11th.