Alfonso Cuarón’s riveting Disclaimer opens with a nuanced pair of episodes

Renée Knight’s Disclaimer is a tough book to adapt, a prestigious soap opera carefully divided into two arcs: a man seeking vengeance on the woman who destroyed his life, and the woman trying to hold her family together under the assault. It cuts back and forth between these halves in almost whiplash-inducing fashion, often with chapters that consist of only a few pages,. And that style is largely replicated in the first episode of Alfonso Cuarón’s excellent Apple TV+ drama of the same name, although it adds a third arc: a flashback that captures the events that tie these very different people together. It’s a daring narrative approach (unsurprisingly from the man who directed Oscar winners like Gravity and Roma), but it completely works, keeping viewers uncertain of where their loyalties should lie or even the true motives behind these characters and their many, many secrets. Ultimately, this is a project that lives up to the prestige of its production, one that brings some of the most acclaimed craftspeople and performers to arguably the only streaming service that can afford them.

The performances are uniformly excellent, but the strength of Disclaimer’s two-part premiere is in the production, an edit that flows seamlessly across different timelines with unique color palettes, narration POVs, and tones. The opulence of one existence is offset against a somber aesthetic in a home that’s shrouded in grief, and both stand out against a flashback of bright sun and grinning youth. Shot by the masterful duo of Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel, Disclaimer is a reminder of how nonexistent the line that used to separate film craft from television has become. It looks absolutely amazing, arguably better than anything on TV in 2024 not named Ripley. 

The first chapter of Disclaimer gains a lot of strength from its triptych structure but that’s difficult to recap, so let’s hit each separately:

In the happiest arc, even though we know it will come crashing down, a young couple backpacks around Italy, first seen making love on a train in a shot that’s already showing off this show’s sharp visual language. The couple are revealed to be young Jonathan Brigstocke (Louis Partridge) and Sasha (Liv Hill), but she is forced to return to London after her aunt dies in a car accident, leaving Jonathan on his own in one of the most beautiful and romantic countries in the world. After a jaunt to Pisa, he ends up on the Mediterranean, where he meets a young Catherine (Leila George), there with her son Nicholas after her husband has returned to England. We will learn that Jonathan and Catherine had enough of an affair that it would lead to steamy photos that would go off like a grenade many years later, but not precisely what happened to poor deceased Jonathan.

Many years later, acclaimed documentarian Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) receives a copy of a book in an unaddressed envelope. “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.” The disclaimer should give her pause. One wonders if she also hesitated on seeing, “To my son, Jonathan,” given we’ll learn that’s a name she knows well.  

Reading The Perfect Stranger later that night rattles Catherine so completely that she vomits before trying to burn the book in the sink as if maybe it’s the only copy in existence. She hides the truth about what the book reveals to her husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) but does admit that she thinks it’s about her. An unseen narrator—mimicking the fact that Catherine’s chapters in the source are in third-person while Stephen’s are in first-person—sums it up: “Your mask has fallen.”

Catherine turns to her son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), about whom she feels guilt over distant parenting and pushing him out of the nest to find his own way. We learn that he works in a department store and can barely communicate with mom, refusing to relive happier memories of childhood or even put his phone down as they unpack in his new place. When he later reveals that he too got a copy of The Perfect Stranger hand-delivered to him by what he presumed was an appreciative customer, he mentions that the protagonist dies at the end of the book that Catherine was too scared to finish. And that the “selfish bitch” deserved it. Yikes.

The third arc of the premiere is for the memorable Stephen Brigstocke (an excellently world-weary Kevin Kline), who is introduced deep in elderly apathy, unconcerned about the students he’s grown tired of teaching. After finally cleaning out the closet his dead wife left many years ago, he finds a purse with a key in it that unlocks the next chapter of his life. It opens a drawer in which his wife Nancy left a manuscript that Stephen would turn into The Perfect Stranger. She also left photographs, the ones that Jonathan took of a young Catherine during their Italian affair. It’s interesting to note how these photos connect dots in Stephen’s memory, saying “I thought she was just a bystander in my life’s demise.” The Stephen arc moves quickly through time compared to the other two as he self-publishes the novel and puts his plan in motion. “There was only one reader I wanted to reach,” he says, still wearing his dead wife’s cardigan.

The second half of the premiere spends much longer in each of the three still-defined arcs, giving it a different momentum, allowing us to linger in emotion instead of generating confusion. It’s an episode about a woman trying to protect her family from the truth, but we’re still unsure of all the details, which makes us wonder if we want Stephen’s grenades to go off or for Catherine to defuse them. After all, even Nicholas thinks the fictional version of his mother deserved her fate.

After seeing the initial meeting between a young Catherine and Jonathan that we glimpsed in photos, the longest scene of the series so far connects Stephen and Nicholas on the day he dropped off his book. Nicholas did help him buy a vacuum cleaner! But Stephen “couldn’t help but notice his impatience,” even later calling him “a complete waste of space.” There’s an interesting counter between the joyful, smiling son we see in Jonathan compared to the morose son played by Smit-McPhee. And it’s kinda funny that Nicholas still thinks he got the book from someone he “helped” rather than “barely tolerated.”

The second of three key scenes in this back half of the premiere takes place ten years ago, just before Nancy Brigstocke (Lesley Manville) died. Catherine went to meet her, and we learn that Nancy said her husband was dead and that her life has been miserable. Catherine didn’t even come to Jonathan’s funeral—so this wasn’t just an Italian affair if Nancy expected to see her at the services. There’s a key line in this scene when Nancy says, “He saved your son.” From what? From who?

The main scene in chapter two starts with Catherine cooking dinner—Robert’s favorite dish of sole meunière—while her husband is receiving a package from Stephen that consists of another copy of the book and the photos that Jonathan took during his tryst. Robert recognizes not just his wife but the hotel room they shared, and his emotions burst to the point that he starts to shake. Interestingly, he goes to his son to see what he knows, but Nicholas was too young to remember anything.

Robert finally comes home, hours later and drunk, and confronts Catherine. He shows her the photos but doesn’t really pause to listen to what she has to say. Might she reveal what really happened? It’s a raw, rough, well-acted scene, especially on Blanchett’s part as she struggles to match her words and emotions. She promises that Nicholas didn’t know, and she clearly wants to tell him something when he pieces together that Jonathan is dead. She thought she was going to get away with it. Not if Stephen Brigstocke has anything to say about it.

Stray observations

• • How prestigious is this cast? All of the five major players have an Oscar nomination! And Blanchett has eight! It’s one of the most esteemed ensembles in years. And then add in the team of Cuarón, Delbonnel, and Lubezki, and it gets kind of insane.
• • Why do you think Stephen uses Joseph Conrad’s real name when he almost buys a vacuum? Sure, it’s long enough to kill time so he can place the envelope, but there’s also something about how Stephen is trying to unpack a true Heart Of Darkness.
• • The first line in an award presentation from Christiane Amanpour feels thematically essential to a story of how a book tears apart a life: “Beware narrative and form.”
• • Stephen’s self-publishing company is called Rhamnousia, which is an ancient Greek Goddess also named “Nemesis.” Tricky, tricky Stephen.
• • Note that Stephen narrates his arc, an unseen omniscient narrator takes Catherine’s, and there isn’t one for Jonathan. This is  just one of the ways Cuarón delineates the threads.
• • I loved the part about how the pleasure of being a wine connoisseur comes from being able to afford it. It feels true of a lot of high-priced hobbies that are as much about displaying wealth as anything else.
• • Can we consider how often Cuarón works with strong female characters and the performances he draws from people like Blanchett, Sandra Bullock and Yalitza Aparicio? He has an underrated gift in that department.
• • It will be interesting to see how long Cuarón/Apple hold the full truth about what happened between Catherine and Jonathan. And will viewers be patient if it takes weeks to find out?