Why you should watch Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer
What happens when a secret you’ve kept for twenty years suddenly comes out? What if that secret only has a semblance of what exactly transpired but not the entire truth? Will you fight for your truth to be heard?
That’s exactly what Catherine Ravenscroft has to face in Disclaimer, the new series on Apple TV+. Adapted from the stealthy psychological thriller by Renée Knight, it tells the story of acclaimed documentary journalist Catherine Ravenscroft and a dark secret she’s kept to herself for over twenty years.
Catherine has a flourishing career, a doting husband, and a complex yet estranged relationship with her son Nicholas. But the life she worked hard for may crumble once her skeletons come out of the closet.
The architect of her downfall is Kevin Kline’s Stephen Brigstocke, a grief-stricken dismissed elderly professor who lost his 19 year-old son Jonathan to an accident at an Italian seaside village twenty years ago. His wife Nancy became reclusive after their son’s death and eventually succumbed to cancer.
Stephen, who blames Catherine for the death of his son, and in turn his wife, is hell-bent in making her pay for her alleged sins.
As one would expect from a premise like this, Catherine’s secret is slowly unraveled, no thanks to Stephen who sends his book “The Perfect Stranger” to her home with no return address. Having no idea who the author is or where the book came from, she decides to read it — after all a good novel is a perfect nightcap. The book, however, has a particularly odd disclaimer: “Any resemblance to any persons living or dead is not a coincidence.”
Catherine eventually finds the novel has enough truth to it that she recognizes herself as the book’s heroine. This is simply where her nightmare begins. Little does she know, she has fallen into Stephen’s plot for revenge — and that’s just halfway through episode one.
With leaden steps, Stephen infiltrates Catherine’s home life, reaching out to her husband, her son, and her workplace, with the goal of “revealing who Catherine Ravenscroft really is,” believing that his self-published diegesis could break her. And as the audience, this is exactly where expectations are subverted.
Beware of narrative and form
At the onset of the series, journalist Christiane Amanpour is seen giving a speech in honor of Catherine at an awards ceremony. She synthesizes Catherine’s exemplary work exposing concealed transgressions of long-respected institutions by saying, “beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with great power to manipulate.”
It is a truth in documentary journalism, but it’s also a warning that the audience must heed as you delve deep into this seven-part narrative by Roma and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban director Alfonso Cuarón.
The form in which the Y Tu Mamá También director decides to tell this narrative is through a limited series — which is in no way limiting. After all let’s be real, a book adaptation into a film leaves out pertinent details the original author explicitly included — and in this chronicle the details are what you should look at.
Cuarón masterfully plays with the narrative and form of what is essentially a serialized film, presenting all the details that audiences won’t even think to second guess. The brilliant performances of the cast only heightens the mystery and the intrigue.
Disclaimer features an ensemble which includes Academy Award winners Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, The Crown alum Lesley Manville, Borat actor Sacha Baron Cohen, Enola Homes’ Louis Partridge and Squid Game’s Hoyeon. Also in the mix are Australian actress Leila George, and Oscar nominee Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Also worth noting is the form in which the author and the auteur decided to tell the story. The novel and the television series (for better or for worse — you decide), both use narration.
The scenes featuring Catherine’s work and home life are sprinkled with an unknown female narrator speaking in both second and third person, while Stephen narrates himself. One could easily conclude that perhaps, Stephen is the one driving the narrative — which in his roman à clef publication, he literally is. Could the narrator be Catherine’s inner monologue as the events unfold?
Like the novel, Cuarón tells the story seamlessly from both sides, alternating from Catherine’s perspective and Stephen’s flashback utilizing the dramatization of the story in “The Perfect Stranger” as the thread that binds the two individuals.
The scenes of the Italian village is nothing short of dreamy, the sequences are softly graded with warm tones, shot as if through rose-colored glasses evoking a time one could be yearning for. This is in stark contrast to the soft cool color grade, jarring zooms and framing of the present time, where you can viscerally feel the frantic energy of the Ravenscroft household’s crisis.
How do we determine the truth?
In the first four episodes of the series, the story is told through what other characters say about Catherine. Audiences can simply see how she reacts to the situations thrown at her, but does not hear what she has to say. This leads viewers to create their own conclusions, without hearing Catherine’s side of the story.
In an interview with Apple TV+, Blanchett says upon reading the initial episodes of the script, she instinctively threw it away as she did not like the character she was set to play. However, by the end of the story, Blanchett says in another interview, she was confronted by the easy ignorant judgements she had made.
Disclaimer asks its audience: Is keeping a personal secret from family and friends wrong? Does it make one deceitful? Do you lose your integrity once the secret is unleashed? Does it matter how, when, and who tells a story? Who should decide when a secret should be revealed? How much privacy are we entitled to have as individuals?
By the end of the series, Disclaimer not only poses the aforementioned questions, but it also invites its audience to look within: how quick are we, as a society, to form opinions and jump to conclusions when we have very little information? It aims to challenge our reasoning and the way we draw out verdicts and asks us to indeed, beware of narrative and form. – Rappler.com