Review: Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Disclaimer’ Slowly Simmers but Never Reaches a Rolling Boil

Alfonso Cuarón’s potboiler Disclaimer, an adaptation of the Renee Knight’s 2015 novel of the same name, begins with famed documentarian Catherine (Cate Blanchett) being fêted at an awards ceremony. Scenes of Catherine and her husband, Roger (Sacha Baron Cohen), living a posh life in their gorgeous London rowhouse are intercut with a storyline about a pair of students, Jonathan (Louis Partridge) and Sasha (Liv Hill), having a gap-year escapade in Italy. Meanwhile, a gloomier third narrative tracks Stephen (Kevin Kline), a widowed schoolteacher who seems to have lost every reason for living except for the drive to exact vengeance on Catherine for a crime that he believes she got away with.

These plot strands are at first loosely knit together, but Cuarón pulls the strings tighter and tighter throughout the first few episodes. Catherine receives a novel, The Perfect Stranger, privately published by Stephen, which seems to mirror a moment from her past that she desperately wants to forget. Disclaimer takes its time revealing the book’s contents to us. But as the Italy-set story progresses, with Jonathan—on his own after Sasha suddenly returns to London—mooning over a glowingly photographed blonde (Leila George), the show’s purple dialogue and hyperbolic framing suggest the work of a writer with an agenda.

Reading The Perfect Stranger sends Catherine into a frenzy, which Blanchett presents in a glintingly precise panic that stops just short of feeling mannered. The woman’s manic state is exacerbated as Stephen—whose muddle-headed affect and grubby, roach-infested home belie his skill for deft subterfuge—delivers copies of the book to a slowly widening circle of Catherine’s family and colleagues. Through it all, Disclaimer takes itself extremely seriously, but it delivers a welcome bit of dark humor when Stephen pretends to toss a grenade over his shoulder as he walks away from delivering yet another copy of the book.

Though Disclaimer is structured around the teasing out of secrets, Cuarón drives most of the first part of the series by ratcheting up emotional, rather than narrative, tension. He relies more on closely observed and often explosive dialogue to generate momentum than he does on cliffhangers or surprise reveals. This is more effective than one might imagine, given the gutting quality of the abandonments faced by Catherine and the frightening fragility of the bonds holding her family together. Scenes with Catherine, Robert, and their son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), are wrenchingly chilly, even before the inciting events occur.

The tangled skein of subplots, further complicated by narration from the distant voice of God (Indira Varma), takes some time to unravel. But Cuarón’s intention to introduce multiple perspectives on seemingly easily understood events—and to question how certain stories are authored—is almost too clearly telegraphed. When, in that opening scene, Catherine receives her award for ostensibly being a “beacon of truth,” the master of ceremonies (Christiane Amanpour) implores her audience to “beware of narrative and form.”

At times, Disclaimer feels like a thriller straining toward a more elevated fiction, what with its self-consciously mesmerizing cinematography (by Bruno Delbonnel and Emmanuel Lubezki), well-paced plot twists that don’t seem to be trying too hard, and a desire to say something meaningful about the modern moment—in this case, our frantic desire for clearly defined villains and heroes. And it almost works. But a sudden rush of revelations in the last two episodes upends much of what came before and resolves the story far too neatly. Having created a series that invested so much in exploring contradictions, Cuarón’s reliance on simple certainties is ultimately both disappointing and dissatisfying.