Susan Granger’s review of “Disclaimer” (Apple TV+)
What a colossal disappointment! The limited series “Disclaimer” begins with a provocative premise: a successful woman’s entire existence is threatened when she receives a self-published book that seems to disclose her innermost secrets.
Shortly after London-based documentary journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) is publicly acclaimed for cutting through “narratives and forms that distract us from hidden truths” and revealing “our own complicity in some of today’s more toxic social sins,” she’s entangled in her own web of deception.
Arriving home one evening, Catherine discovers a docu-novel titled “The Perfect Stranger” that begins with a curious disclaimer: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.”
The narrative reveals that – 20 years earlier, while on a beach vacation in Italy with her then-five year-old son, Nicholas – young Catherine (Leila George) allegedly had an affair with 19 year-old Jonathan Brigstocke (Louis Partridge) after which she was indirectly responsible for his subsequent death by drowning.
Jonathan’s devastated parents – Stephen (Kevin Kline) and Nancy (Leslie Manville) – never recovered from the loss of their only child. Before she died of cancer, Nancy wrote “The Perfect Stranger,” filled with tawdry accusations based on a packet of erotic, sexually explicit photographs that Jonathan took of Catherine.
Still grieving, vengeful Stephen delivers copies to Catherine’s dim-witted, judgmental husband Robert (Sasha Baron Cohen), now-25 year-old depressed, drug-addicted son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), along with Catherine’s stunned co-workers, causing her life to spin into turmoil.
Based on Renee Knight’s raunchy psychological thriller, it’s the work of Mexican writer/director Alfonso Cuaron (“Roma,” “Gravity”), who devotes the first six episodes to Nancy’s lurid interpretation of how Catherine seduced her son and caused his death at sea.
It isn’t until the seventh – concluding – episode that Catherine is able to confront crazed, elderly Stephen and relate her side of the story. Drenched with banal melodrama, designed to manipulate, Indira Verma’s voice-over narration at this point is overly expository and moralizing.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Disclaimer” is a frustrating 5 – with all episodes now streaming on Apple TV+.
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