‘Disclaimer’ Review: Who Can We Trust in Alfonso Cuaron’s Spellbinding Two-Part Premiere? — Spoilers

In the first two episodes, Alfonso Cuarón cautions viewers against blindly accepting manipulative narratives before dropping us into a doozy of disparate perspectives. But is the truth well-hidden, or staring us straight in the face?

[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “Disclaimer” Episode 1 (“I”) and Episode 2 (“II”).]

It takes a certain kind of storyteller to start their story with a warning about how they’re going to tell it. Lucky for us, Alfonso Cuarón is exactly that kind of raconteur. Confident in his abilities to portray complicated characters via innovative techniques, the four-time Oscar winner behind “Y tu mamá también” and “Roma” is back with an ambitious new project, “Disclaimer,” about a mysterious book that’s discovery and dispersion wreaks havoc on the lives of its subject, her family, and quite possibly its authors, as well.

“Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate.” These words, spoken at a dinner honoring Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), are shared as Cuarón’s camera lingers in close-up on the recipient’s inscrutable reaction. Is she… nervous? Angry? Simply uncomfortable in the spotlight? Even as the speech continues, becoming plainly positive in its praise for the documentarian’s body of work, Catherine remains ambiguous. Her initial expression becomes an inkblot test for the audience as the rest of the two-episode premiere plays out. Who is this woman? What’s she done? And whatever it is, does she deserve such ruthless punishment?

But Cuarón’s opening disclaimer doesn’t stop there. Beyond reminding us of a TV show’s ability to court speculation, Catherine’s introduction also suggests that the guessing game itself can reveal difficult truths about those doing the guessing. “[Narrative and form] can manipulate us only because of our own deeply held beliefs and the judgments we make,” the speaker says. “And in this way, Catherine reveals something more problematic and profound: our own complicity in some of today’s more toxic social sins.”

Through this explicit address, Cuarón is calling his shot. He’s instructing viewers to be on guard against the artifice of a good mystery, and if they aren’t, “Disclaimer” may reveal as much about you, dear reader, as it does about Catherine. When you assume, after all… well, you know the rest. So let’s take the author’s advice and pay attention. After the initial two episodes, what do we know about the main characters we’ve met? What’s true and what may only appear to be true? Where are we being led, and how are Cuarón & Co. leading us there? Ultimately, the truth won’t be revealed until the very end, but there’s much to learn, admire, and discover along the way — starting where Cuarón really starts his story: with two horny kids on holiday looking for semi-discreet places to have sex.

Jonathan

Technically, “Disclaimer’s” first disclaimer isn’t Cuarón’s. It’s the viewer advisory for “strong sexual content and depictions of sexual, physical, and emotional violence.” Getting right to it, Episode 1’s opening iris shot reveals two twenty-somethings already in the throes of passion. Wedged inside a private train car as the sun rises over the Italian countryside, Sasha (Liv Hill) pleads with Jonathan (Louis Partridge) not to stop. But as the rumbling train grows louder and louder, the picture-perfect morning comes to an abrupt end — first, when Jonathan arrives ahead of schedule, and then when the conductor intrudes, demanding to see the naked passengers’ tickets.

Unfazed, the two go right back to it once they’re alone again, and they keep the good times rolling after the train stops at Venice station. Camera slung over his shoulder, Jonathan appears to be a typical, unabashed tourist. They take a gondola ride, see the sights, and listen to a madrigal chorus, laughing, kissing, and running around in between. But the trip faces its first trial when Sasha gets a call from her distraught mother, whose just found out her sister (Sasha’s aunt) was hit by a bus and died. Now, Sasha has to go back to London, and Jonathan is left to wander a foreign city on his own.

After a few unsuccessful attempts to make friends, an innocent misunderstanding shifts Jonathan’s fortunes. Spotting a beautiful woman (Leila George) watching over her young son, he picks up his camera to capture the light bouncing off the sea and sparkling through her sheer sarong. Episode 1 ends as she turns to see him, smiling into the camera as white light floods the screen. But in Episode 2, she confronts Jonathan about his lurid hobby, good-naturedly challenging his claims that he was only taking pictures of her “aura.” “These pictures of this aura,” she says, “what are you going to do with them? Are you going to look at them? You’re going to look at the auras?” Struck dumb with desire, dismay, or both, Jonathan can barely speak, but when she starts walking away with her young son, he helps carry her things and charms the 4-year-old boy with his own boyish disposition.

The trio continue on their way inland, but that’s the last we see of them this week. The rest we piece together from other stories, told by other people, decades into the future. The woman Jonathan met is Catherine. She was on vacation with her son, Nicholas, and her husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) — who we don’t see in Italy — apparently returned to London early for work. With both their partners gone, Catherine and Jonathan embarked on some sort of liaison, although what exactly happened with them remains a mystery. All we know for certain is that they knew each other, someone took sexy photos of Catherine, and Jonathan is now dead.

But what else can we glean from Jonathan’s Italian excursion? For one, it’s the most formally distinct section of “Disclaimer.” Each of Jonathan’s segments opens with an iris-in and closes with an iris-out — a visual cue unique to Jonathan’s narrative. His are also the only scenes not to include some form of voiceover. Catherine’s present-day life is told with second-person narration, Stephen’s is first-person, and Robert’s is third-person. But Jonathan’s story unfurls without a guiding voice. That, at first, gives the appearance of neutrality. Without an internal monologue, what we’re seeing could be what really happened — the plain, unvarnished truth.

But if that’s the case, why the irises? Why use such pronounced transitions? Why remind viewers that everything they’re seeing has been designed, scene by scene, shot by shot, word by word? Opening and closing the iris on a specific image makes it feel as if we’re dipping in and out of the story, seeing only what we’re supposed to see, instead of the full picture. Suspicious!

Trust Level: 4/10

Stephen

Stephen, in comparison, is the living embodiment of plain. Cast in the pale gray of a perpetually rainy London day, we meet Kevin Kline’s fed-up widower as he morosely casts aside his last remaining obligations. The long-term teacher can’t pretend to care about his whiny students anymore and uses a seemingly routine parent’s complaint as an excuse to get canned. But instead of retiring to his decaying home to die a slow, miserable death wrapped in his wife’s moth-eaten cardigan, Stephen makes a life-changing discovery. With it, and free from previous distractions like work and shaving, he can focus on the only thing that matters: revenge.

So let’s talk about the book. Titled “The Perfect Stranger” and written by his late wife, Nancy (Lesley Manville), the novel is dedicated to their son and comes with “Disclaimer’s” titular disclaimer: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.” Incentivized by the perceived truth in whatever Nancy wrote — the implication being that Catherine did something horrible to Jonathan during their time together in Italy — Stephen goes about publishing the book and sending it to its subjects (Catherine as well as her son, Nicholas, played by Oscar nominee Kodi Smit-McPhee). At the same time, he prints copies of illicit photos he found among his wife’s old things and drops those off for Catherine’s husband, Robert, at work. By the end of Episode 2, he’s already broken up their marriage, and it feels like he’s just getting started.

Stephen, who narrates his scenes in the first-person, is a clever central character. On the one hand, he’s an agent of chaos; a man at the end of his rope who hobbles into action because he’s got nothing left to lose. Seeing how miserable his life has become, it’s natural to hope Stephen gets one last win. Sure, he’s being vindictive and cruel (the look on his face when he traps that cockroach under a glass — yikes), but he’s old, depressed, and his wife and son are both dead. Maybe he’s earned the chance to take this rich white lady down a peg or two.

It certainly seems like a fair scheme from the outside looking in: Everyone who reads Nancy’s book assures Stephen the central character deserves her vicious comeuppance. Nicholas goes so far as to call the woman, who he doesn’t know is based on his mother, “a selfish bitch […] she dies and she deserved it.” Stephen’s friend (and former principal), Justin (Art Malik), took a bit of nudging, but he “wasn’t sorry when it happens, so I guess, yeah, she deserved it!” We, of course, don’t know what happens to her in the book. That’s part of the mystery. But Cuarón is nudging our sympathies (and resentments) as he sees fit.

It’s easy to believe everything that happens to Stephen is true — true, at least, to him. What’s harder to believe is whether he knows what he’s doing. Stephen makes a lot of assumptions, whether it’s about the “spoiled, entitled brats” he once taught, the “waste of space” he sees when he meets at Nicholas while not buying a vacuum cleaner, or the posthumous intentions of a lifelong partner who pushed him away a long time ago.

While considering what to do with “The Perfect Stranger,” Stephen says, “I came to understand that Nancy wanted me to find her manuscript, just as she wanted me to find the photos.” But… did she? The purse wasn’t tucked away in the back of a drawer; it was wedged under her dresser, behind a panel that’s not designed to open. The book, meanwhile, was tucked away in the back of a drawer, but it was also kept in a room that Nancy explicitly told her husband never to enter. She even locked the drawer where she stored the novel with a dedication that reads, “To my son, Jonathan” — not “To my husband, Stephen.” Perhaps the book was meant to stay hidden away. Perhaps Stephen was, too.

Trust Level: 5/10

Catherine

Catherine certainly would’ve preferred a life where Stephen Brigstocke stayed dead, as she long believed him to be. But Cuarón uses her obliviousness against her, painting Catherine as the opposite of her unknown nemesis — a wealthy, well-regarded, wine-sniffing elitist who has no idea how her actions have affected the poor, disgraced, beer-swilling commoner from her past. The first episode ping-pongs between the two to crystalize those comparisons: His career is over, hers is flourishing. He hates the spoiled little brats who inhabit his classrooms, she raised a spoiled little brat who only recently stopped inhabiting her home. Speaking of homes, his is dreary and sad, and hers is bursting with light (that kitchen, my god) and love. (Robert, when we first meet him, is supportive and caring.)

Everything is on the right track for Catherine until Stephen and his book come along, and her reaction to reading it is the same as the GOP’s approach to federal aid: She tries to wipe it off the face the earth. Up all night, chewing her fingernails as she turns the pages, Catherine flashes back to her Italian vacation: Quick glimpses show her naked in bed, then out on the beach, then watching a body get covered with a sheet. Back in the present, she’s rushing to the toilet to throw up, before standing over the sink, the book in one hand, the lighter in another. When Robert comes downstairs to see the fire, he puts it out, and their panicked discourse reveals snippets of feelings — anxiety, anger, anguish — with very few facts. Still, what’s said certainly invites certain inferences:

• “The book, it’s about me,” she says. “I think I’m being punished.”
• “Something in that book made me hate myself all over again.”
• “You’re a good person,” Robert says. “Am I?” Catherine replies. “I’m not a good wife, and I feel like I have been a terrible mother.”

Innocent people aren’t typically punished, nor should whatever’s in that book make Catherine hate herself unless there’s some truth to it. Later, Catherine claims she’s the “victim” in all this, but given modern narratives about privilege and accountability, it’s not a far leap to assume Catherine is terrified because she’s about to get canceled. Episode 2 only compounds that idea, what with a young Catherine overtly flirting with Jonathan back in Italy (presumably instigating an affair behind Robert’s back) and then, years later, refusing Nancy’s dying wish to meet Nicholas. “Your son is running around above ground while mine lies rotting beneath,” the cancer-stricken woman screams at Catherine. “Nicholas owes his life to my son. She should know he wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Jonathan.”

Yikes. Good luck recovering from that one, Catherine.

Still, following Cuarón’s guidance, when you feel yourself being led one way, that means you need to consider other possible avenues. Perhaps that’s why Catherine’s second-person narration feels so critical. Using “you” on behalf of the subject (instead of “I” or “she”) can draw the audience closer to a character or it can create distance. Second-person exists in the space between first- and third-person, where the former is the most personal (“I did this,” “I did that”) and the latter is the most detached. (“She did this,” “They did that.”)

Each tense is capable of going the other route — first-person can be detached, and third-person can be personal — but using “you” for Catherine puts the audience in a position to either map themselves onto the character or move further away from her. Which we do depends on the context. Right now, it seems like Catherine has something to hide. She seems guilty, so we’re going to push her away. But later on, we may feel guilty for doing so if we come to sympathize with Catherine — say, if Stephen goes too far with his plan. Perhaps this is Cuarón’s way of “revealing our own complicity” in interpreting her story.

Trust Level: 4/10

Robert

While it seems too early to tell how much we should trust Catherine and Stephen, after two episodes, Robert is almost irrecoverably crooked. Sure, he’s more of a supporting player in this drama, and he looks the part of a loving husband and father, but Robert’s flaws are glaring compared to our other characters.

Strike one: Robert is a nepo baby. He works at Hope Charitable Trust, an umbrella company for multiple NGOs (non-governmental organizations), “many of them founded by his family for charity purposes and prestige.” OK, maybe he’s actually trying to do some good with his inherited wealth. After all, early on in Episode 2, he’s yelling at his half-brother Hugo, who wants to move the family charities to a different firm. “They see all these NGOs and charities as means of tax relief and green-washing,” Robert says about Hugo and those siding with him. “They fail to understand that they must do their work.” Is Robert standing up for the charities? Is he fighting on their behalf, so they can continue to do vital work with the money provided by his family?

Perhaps, but “green-washing” sure doesn’t sound good, and later in the episode, we find out — via third-person narration — that the real purpose of Hope Charitable Trust is “to circumvent anti-money-laundering compliance rules.” So not only is Robert working in a business founded by his family, but his business is shady as shit. That’s strike two.

Equally troubling is his relationship with his family. The first episode casts Robert as an ideal partner and caregiver. He stands proudly by his wife during her awards ceremony. He insists on celebrating her honor, and he refuses to let her diminish the achievement. When she freaks out about the book, he reassures her and promises to stand by her, no matter what. “You can tell me anything, and I swear I will never, ever judge you,” he says.

Well, that promise lasted… what? One day? Maybe 36 hours? The second Robert sees those photos, he ignores Catherine’s texts, calls, and special dinner. Instead, he takes their son out to a local pub, hoping to pry information from him about his trip to Italy 20 years prior. Then, when he does come home, he talks over her and storms out. Catherine, clearly overwhelmed by the book and the pictures, barely gets a word out, but she promises to tell him everything and, instead of listening, he flees the house. Robert has every right to be angry if his wife has been hiding an affair, but he should hear it from her first.

Strike three? “Disclaimer” is too secretive to be dismissing anyone after two hours, so we’ll keep the door cracked open for Robert, especially since so much of the story is shaped by his perspective. His view of the photographs seems similar to the harsh judgment Stephen hands down, but we’re still in his head while looking over the revealing pictures of Catherine. “This is a young woman bursting with desire, enjoying pleasure with absolute abandon, her desire in pure form, separated from him,” the narrator says about Robert. Later, it’s his interrogation of Catherine that further emphasizes her fault in whatever happened all those years ago. She sits there and takes it. She’s already said she hates herself for what happened, and she doesn’t see herself as a good person. Is Robert right to agree with her, now that he’s been confronted with the pictures and the book? Or is he still too in the dark to cast judgment, as we, the audience, find ourselves now?

Until next week!

Trust Level: 1/10

Grade: A-

“Disclaimer” is available on Apple TV+. Episodes 3 and 4 will be released Friday, October 18, and the final three episodes will be released weekly through the finale on November 8.