Why you should watch Apple TV’s ‘Disclaimer’: yes, it can be self-indulgent, but it’s a worthy project from a master filmmaker

What TV shows are dominating the conversation, capturing the zeitgeist or are hidden gems waiting to be uncovered? We take a look ahead of your weekend watch.
“Any resemblance to a person living or dead is not a coincidence” reads like a threat and it’s printed on the second page of “The Perfect Stranger,” a book that Catherine (Cate Blanchett) receives in the mail in the first episode of “Disclaimer,” Apple TV’s newest thriller miniseries.
Earlier that same day, Catherine had been recognized at an awards ceremony for her journalism, the presenter specifically noting that her work has “cut through narratives and forms that distract from hidden truths,” a prescient observation. This is the crux of the show’s intrigue: to get at how we bury, reveal, interpret and corrupt the truth.
While reading this book, Catherine is horrified to discover that it recounts the encounter she had with 18-year-old Jonathan (Louis Partridge) two decades prior, when she was a young mother. Jonathan died that very summer and thus unfurls a smattering of questions, for Catherine and ourselves: Who else knew about this affair? Why raise it now in so targeted a way and to what end?
Over seven dramatic episodes, we chart Catherine’s oscillation between action and denial, cruelty and self-pity. She makes for a compelling subject in that she is mysteriously unpredictable; soft and docile toward her husband (a prim and proper Sacha Baron Cohen) and then strict and severe with her son (Kodi Smit-McPhee).
The resurfacing of a two-decades-old memory through the publishing of this book shatters her world and, through this dramatic domestic implosion, showrunner Alfonso Cuarón is able to explore how fragile a thing memory is: suppressing it can lead it to fester and rot, but living in it can be all-consuming and alienating.
In his latest TV series, Cuarón (“Believe”) offers us entry into two opposite worlds: a sunny, yellow-tinged Italy, hot and lusty, and a gloomy London, bleak and asexual. Twenty years separate these disparate worlds; the former is anachronistic, the latter entirely embedded in our current time.
The show weaves its stories in a three-stranded braid: in the present day, we follow Catherine as well as Jonathan’s father, Stephen (Kevin Kline), respectively the subject and the publisher of “The Perfect Stranger.”
After living with his grief, Stephen decides to finally take revenge by publishing the book his wife wrote before her own death, knowing that the revelation of Catherine’s role in Jonathan’s death will ruin her personal life and tarnish her professional reputation. Catherine has spent two decades running away from the truth while Stephen has spent the same time obsessing over it, and their clash proves explosive.
Interspersed between these acts of vengeance and reckoning is the fateful summer in Italy. As the encounter between the new mother and the hitchhiking teenager progresses, we’re faced with deepening layers of social taboos: adultery, grooming, manipulation. The lust Catherine appears to feel for Jonathan seems ominous and this is for good reason: we’re not being shown an objective rendering of the event, but rather the way it is written in the book — an interpretation by Jonathan’s grieving mother.
What we first interpret as an agent of clarity — a storyline that promised to fill in the gaps for our present-day drama — soon becomes a destabilizing force, forcing us to parse reality from fiction and track the past’s reverberations to the current time.
This is fairly standard procedure for the psychological thriller: having an unreliable narrator move us through the story. The themes, too, are standard fare: “Rear Window” (1954), “Memento” (2000) and “Gone Girl” (2014) are all films that focus on the obfuscation of truth in grief and shame, and the corruption of memory, led by a deceptive protagonist.
“Disclaimer” does little to improve upon the tropes or themes emblematic of this sub-genre, but its central performances and fast-paced, dynamic narrative make it a compelling watch, even if the dialogue flirts with clichés one too many times.
It’s a show that doesn’t shy away from its salacious progenitors, littering almost every episode with explicit sex scenes and, though some sequences are overly self-indulgent in their theatrics, it ultimately finds the right balance between melodrama and realism. It’s a special kind of balance that Cuarón has struck many times before.
Throughout his career as a filmmaker, Cuarón has maintained a singular artistry despite jumping from genre to genre: initially it may appear that “Y tu mamá también” (2001), “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004), “Children of Men” (2006) and “Gravity” (2013) share few similarities, they all reveal Cuaron’s taste for dynamic camera work (most notably, the long shot) and construction of nuanced worlds inhabited by complex characters.
For Cuarón, who has been awarded the Academy Award for best director twice, “Disclaimer” has been a project almost a decade in the making: he wanted to adapt Renée Knight’s book back when it was first published in 2015, but set it aside upon realizing it would not work within the time constraints of a conventional film.
He decided to adapt it in the form of a marathon film over four hours long, before finally settling on episodic television. It’s a decision that lends “Disclaimer” many of its most tense and suspenseful moments, as well as its precision: revelations are timed to play out at the culmination of each episode so that all the different strands of the story must come together at least once during each instalment.
Though at times “Disclaimer” feels like it’s more an exercise of form than narrative, it’s a worthy new project from a master filmmaker who understands that the essence of humanity is a paradox ripe for exploration: the duelling instincts for self-preservation and moral absolution.
All episodes of “Disclaimer” are now streaming on Apple TV Plus.