Written and directed by Oscar-winner Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Roma), and starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Lesley Manville, Disclaimer has an unimpeachable pedigree. No amount of artistic talent, however, can salvage this seven-part series, which works when it embraces its pulpier instincts but unwisely opts, during its table-turning finale, to wag its finger at anyone who might have enjoyed its more thriller-ish aspects.
It’s a grave misstep compounded by plotting that’s both distended and, at times, preposterous. Still, if less than the sum of its parts, it does boast a delicious performance from Kline as a man on a mission of a most devious sort.
Premiering Oct. 11 on Apple TV+ and based on Renée Knight’s 2015 novel, Disclaimer opens with documentarian Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett) being feted at a gala by Christiane Amanpour—an immediate (if unintended by Cuarón) sign of her journalistic untrustworthiness. Catherine is praised for revealing “our own complicity in some of today’s most toxic sins,” and as it turns out, she’s believed by retired private school teacher Stephen Brigstocke (Kline) to be guilty of a heinous offense.
Stephen is coping with the recent passing of his wife Nancy (Manville), which followed years of grieving the death of their twentysomething son Jonathan (Louis Partridge). After donating her clothes to charity, he discovers the key to the locked drawer in the desk she used in Jonathan’s bedroom. Inside, he discovers “The Perfect Stranger,” a manuscript dedicated to Jonathan and featuring the disclaimer that “any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.”
Kodi Smit-McPhee, Cate Blanchett, and Sacha Baron Cohen
Apple TV+
Disclaimer is narrated by both Catherine and Stephen, and during its initial few episodes, its action is divided not only between them but also flashbacks (indicated by opening and closing iris shots) to Jonathan’s vacation in Italy with his girlfriend Sasha.
In these sequences, the young frisky couple come across as insufferable, so it’s no great loss when Sasha has to unexpectedly travel back home. Her departure is the catalyst for the series’ signature meeting between Jonathan and a young Catherine (Leila George), and that encounter is additionally the subject of “The Perfect Stranger.” Self-publishing the book and surreptitiously delivering it to Catherine, her charity bigwig husband Robert (Cohen), and their mopey do-nothing son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee)—who’s estranged from his mother, for unexplained reasons—Stephen sets a Machiavellian plan in motion that aims to destroy Catherine’s personal and professional lives.
Louis Partridge and Leila George
Apple TV+
Cuarón’s supple camerawork moves in tune with his constantly in-motion characters as they talk and bicker while navigating domestic and workplace settings, but his script’s drama ranges from natural to creaky, the latter of which is the case with most scenes involving Jonathan or Nicholas. Fortunately, his two leads are in stellar form.
Blanchett’s Catherine is a truth-teller with a virtuous reputation whose confidence is shaken by the appearance of “The Perfect Stranger” and, more damning, a collection of photographs that appear to corroborate the book’s ugly events. Stripping away her character’s self-assurance one layer at a time, the actress exudes empathetic vulnerability even when the series exacerbates her crisis by preventing her from doing the few things that would stop it in its tracks.
With whiplash speed, “The Perfect Stranger” is everywhere, with readers all agreeing that its primary female character is a horrible “b—h.” Since this character is modeled after Catherine, she’s naturally upset by this, and eventually deduces that the person behind the ruinous scheme is Stephen. Kline roots his widower’s behavior in weighty grief before embodying him as a devilish conspirator determined to exact revenge against the filmmaker for her sins, and willing to use his old age—or, rather, to affect an excessively elderly posture and voice—to help facilitate his ends. It’s a fantastically wily turn by the acclaimed actor, both amusing and cunning, such that it’s easy to root for Stephen to give Catherine the comeuppance she appears to richly deserve.
Disclaimer leans so heavily in Stephen’s favor from the outset, though, that it’s impossible not to anticipate a late revelatory switcharoo. When that expectation is inevitably met, it renders the affair a moralistic sermon about, well, revealing that would spoil the show’s climactic surprises. Suffice it to say, however, that Catherine isn’t everything that Stephen makes her out to be, and that the version of events presented in flashbacks may not be wholly reliable.
Between Catherine and Stephen’s literary voiceover and the latter’s bombshell tome, Cuarón positions his material as an investigation into the nature of storytelling. Yet that concern, while initially tantalizing, is raised in a narrative that can’t decide whether it wants to suspensefully entertain, as it does in its middle passages, or merely scold, as is the case with its conclusion.
Whether he’s rubbing his hands together like a master villain or pretending to throw a bomb over his shoulder (complete with a soft “kaboom” noise), Kline is so likable that he singlehandedly keeps the show running smoothly along its preordained track.
Disclaimer often spends more time on incidents than they require, imparting the sense that it’s stretching things out to fit a streaming-TV template, and a few of its twists resound as out of left field and too convenient, including Nicholas’ secret habit of visiting places that he most definitely shouldn’t. It’s frequently caught between being a genre potboiler and a serious examination of trauma, kneejerk judgements, cancel culture, and trust, and yet Kline navigates it all with charming aplomb—at least up until the proceedings betray his character in favor of easy-bake uplift.
Catherine may become the protagonist of a character-assassination novel, but the longer it goes on, the more Disclaimer renders her simply a device designed to forward a tsk-tsk message about who and what we choose to believe. That might have worked were the series not an obviously rigged game from the start, and if it didn’t require so many leaps of faith to get its point across. Instead of truly pulling the rug out from under viewers, it serves up the most pedestrian and foreseeable shocks available to it, in the process squandering Kline’s welcome return to the A-list spotlight.
