Disclaimer Series-Premiere Recap: The Perfect Stranger

Disclaimer
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Season 1 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating ★★★

Disclaimer issues a warning to its audience early on: “Beware of narrative and form.” The words belong to an unnamed awards-ceremony emcee, and she’s talking specifically about documentary filmmaking — how journalists and producers can massage a story by privileging one voice over another; how a close telling can eliminate psychic distance but a wider view might be better suited to capturing the truth.

The fictional TV series Disclaimer, which is based on a 2015 domestic noir thriller from Renée Knight, feels like it was written by someone who took that warning seriously and decided the path to verisimilitude is to use as many narratives and forms as possible. The story is told in three different time registers: the distant past, recent flashback, and the present day. It’s told from multiple perspectives, including a baffling voice-over in the second person that’s helped along by the fact that it’s the sublime voice of Cate Blanchett. But the ironic effect of telling a story so comprehensively — from so many starting points and from so many points of view — is that its themes can be hard to follow. What is Disclaimer about? Well, that depends. Is it good? It’s definitely ambitious.

In the oldest and most historical of the series’ timelines, Disclaimer is about the knife’s edge between youthful folly and deadly tragedy. We meet British teen Jonathan (Louis Partridge) and his girlfriend, Sasha, as they’re having sex in a sleeper car. They’re backpacking; maybe it’s their gap year — a shoestring version of the Grand Tour powered by old editions of Lonely Planet. We can tell right away that Jonathan is a little reckless because he struggles to find the train tickets when a conductor catches the duo together. And we know that Sasha won’t be an important character because the poor actress who plays her is saddled with impossible dialogue. She’s all “wanker” and “shagging” and “knickers.” The names of various tube stops. It’s like Alfonso Cuarón, who adapted Knight’s novel himself, pulled up ChatGPT and typed in: “Say London tings, bruv.”

But they’re young, and they’re in love. Well, if not in love, they are at least in Venice. Almost immediately, Jonathan threatens to tip a gondolier into the canal by rocking his boat but stops short of throwing the man overboard. Jonathan’s a dick, but not too much of a dick. His parents have taught him manners, which he can’t bring himself to quit entirely, even though pretending to be rude and remorseless is impressing Sasha. They flash the world Sasha’s underpants. They make out on the train platform. Maybe it’s the slant of the Venetian light or the iris transitions that Cuarón uses to fade into and out of their story, but Sasha and Jonathan have real “about to die” energy from the moment we meet them. 

For Sasha, though, there will be a reprieve. Her continental shenanigans are cut short by a death in the family, leaving Jonathan to tour Europe alone. He roams a bit aimlessly, trying and failing to strike up conversations with other teens. He sends a postcard to his mum from Pisa before deciding to head to the nearby coast. Livorno maybe. Or Amalfi. The world belongs to him. 

Twenty years later, in the present-day thread, TV documentarian Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett) is sitting at an awards ceremony, listening as a presenter pontificates on the beguiling power of narrative and form. Catherine is about to collect an honor for being a “beacon of truth,” which she seems pleased about. Her husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen proving that he cleans up well), is a wife guy, except that he’s not online. He’s also a wine guy. The happy couple live in an excessively nice house that demands you discount any problems they might face. If you can afford triple-glazed panoramic windows in central London, how bad can it really be?

When they get home from the ceremony, Robert suggests taking a bottle of red to bed, but Catherine insists on opening the day’s mail first — a simple act that Blanchett mimes unconvincingly, tearing open envelopes but forgetting to glance at the actual letters inside. This wouldn’t be worth mentioning except that the remainder of the episode turns on the idea that Catherine takes the post very seriously. For example, when she receives what looks like an advance reader’s copy of a new book — something I presume publishers send her all the time — Catherine immediately sets about inspecting it. 

Two features catch her eye. The dedication: “To my son, Jonathan.” Vague, generic. And the disclaimer: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.” Punchy, a built-in marketing campaign. Something about the juxtaposition of these two sentiments persuades Catherine to crack the book right away. She chews her hair with anxiety as she reads; it becomes impossible for her to repress images and sensations from years past. We see flashes of her as a younger woman in flagrante and relishing her sexuality. We see her clutching someone close, and we see a dead body washed up on a beach. The recollections are enough to make Catherine hurl up her Bordeaux. If your bathroom is that spacious, though, is it really a burden to be retching?

When she recovers, Cathy burns her copy of The Perfect Stranger in the kitchen sink. The book’s about her, she thinks. Here, Cuarón’s writing veers into the theatrical. “Something in that book made me hate myself all over again,” Catherine tells her husband, Bobby, who has jumped out of bed in the pink pre-dawn to put out the actual flagrante. Catherine can’t possibly believe hers is the only copy of the novel, but she finds it easy to jump from the terrible thing she’s done — whatever that is — to limiting the number of people who know about it. She even manages not to confess to Robert, who calls her “Saint Catherine” and calms her nerves. I can’t decide if he’s too good for her or simply blinded by the power of her narrative and form. If this were my marriage, I would be trying to salvage the scraps of the book at the bottom of the sink.

Instead, Robert assumes Catherine’s spiraling hysteria is rooted in the frosty relationship she shares with their 25-year-old son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee as a spoiled brat with incel vibes). He assures Saint Catherine that she was right to expel their stalled man-child from the palatial home the couple have downsized into. She may have been an absent mother to their only child, but she was a tremendous example to him, a beacon of truth. Some moms are home for bedtime, and some moms “break through the veil that has long protected prominent institutions and their often charismatic perpetrators,” or so the awards presenter put it.

Then there’s timeline No. 3. This one is about vengeance. Somewhere in the recent past, but much closer to Catherine’s present day than Jonathan’s historical past, Stephen (a possibly woefully miscast Kevin Kline; time will tell) loses his job. He’s been a secondary-school teacher for 50 years, and now he hates it, which is a reasonable reaction to having spent 50 years in the company of teenage boys and, increasingly, their helicopter moms. 

This revolution in how he will spend his days shakes something loose in Stephen. Nine years after his wife Nancy’s death, he’s finally motivated to donate her old clothes. (He keeps only a snug, moth-eaten pink cardigan, which he wears through much of the episode, indicating that he’s both nostalgic and batty.) He revisits her things; he revisits his grief. He finds a packet of photos in a handbag: Jonathan’s photos. To my son, Jonathan. The pictures are of the same young woman who haunts Catherine, a younger version of herself, posing seductively in red “knickers.” Stephen recognizes this woman, whom he previously believed to be an “innocent bystander” to his own life’s tragedy, which I can only imagine calls back to the scene at the beach. Catherine beside a dead body. Jonathan’s body. To my son, Jonathan.

Nancy has been dead a decade and only now is Stephen uncovering what she’d known for … well, how long? He works up the courage to open the locked drawer in his wife’s desk — the wife who grew distant before she died, holing up in their dead son’s bedroom, barring her husband from entering Jonathan’s old room like she barred him from helping her with baby Jonathan in the sleepless nights. She was typing, always typing. Stephen never knew what she was working on, but, of course, we already do. In the drawer, he finds a copy of The Perfect Stranger, a story ripped from her own life but largely improvised, surely, because what could Nancy really know? Enough, it seems — enough. Even with a flimsy veil of fiction applied, it’s close enough to the truth to make Catherine Ravenscroft dry-heave.

Stephen, so recently circling life’s drain, finds a renewed sense of purpose. With the help of his old boss, he self-publishes a few copies of The Perfect Stranger under a nom de plume. He’ll send one to Catherine, we already know, but it will take more than one copy in circulation to make this perfect stranger suffer. We eventually learn that a copy is delivered to the department store where Nick disappoints his mother by selling blenders and washing machines. Nick who, at 25, will turn up the volume on his phone to passive-aggressively avoid conversation with Catherine. Nick who takes his mother’s clumsy questioning over whether or not he finished The Perfect Stranger as an attack on his literacy, which it definitely is. Nick who really liked the ending of the book when “the selfish bitch dies” without perceiving it was his own mother being killed off, at least not consciously.

In its first 45-minute installment, Disclaimer feels reminiscent of Big Little Lies and Expats and any number of class-conscious series that tend to star Nicole Kidman. When bad things happen to people who drink vintage wine from crystal glasses, is it just as bad as when they happen to everyone else? Is it even worse? This isn’t new terrain for TV to cover by any stretch, though it feels new by dint of Alfonso Cuarón’s touch. Those schlocky iris transitions that bookend our glimpses of Jonathan’s timeline, for example, echo the opening and closing of his camera aperture. A Nikon that Jonathan hardly knows how to use. A gift from his mother, who will one day find his film spools and use them to re-create the facts of what befell her only son, the one she nursed through the nights all on her own wearing a dusty rose cardigan.

In fact, there are more stupid-lovely moments in one episode of Disclaimer than in most feature films. Kevin Kline sitting at his son’s desk and inhaling some ’90s British equivalent of Axe body spray like it’s ambrosial. Imagine being able to smell your dead son again two decades on. Later, Stephen captures a cockroach in an upturned water glass as he daydreams about ferreting Catherine out of her comfortable life. This is more than a revenge scheme. The Perfect Stranger, which Stephen didn’t even write, has given him the illusion of strength, of vitality, of consequence. He can’t even squash the bug on his own kitchen counter, but he’ll get her, or so he believes.

There is a small twist at the episode’s end. Whatever Catherine did (or didn’t do?) to cause (or not prevent?) Jonathan’s death happened less deeply in the past than many viewers, myself included, may have initially assumed. She’s already a mother when Jonathan starts taking her photo on the beach. The first time she locks eyes with the doomed boy, her own son — the one who hates her now — is playing in the surf a few feet away. Catherine’s playing with her hair, the same hair she’ll chew 20 years from now when she revisits this moment in print. When she reads about it from the point of view of her young lover’s mother, who could not save her son but may yet from the grave extinguish this beacon of truth.