Disclaimer ★★★★1⁄2 Apple TV+, Friday It’s a staggering collection of talent. Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, writing and directing in full a limited series starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Kodi Smitt-McPhee. But as exquisitely as this psychological thriller is made – sublime technical aspects made me gasp – it’s intently focused on drawing out every seething facet in Renee Knight’s 2015 novel of the same title.
Emotionally visceral, Disclaimer carves out the flaws in its adversarial Londoners: parenting corrupts, forgiveness is a weapon, and self-deception comforts. Cate Blanchett and Sacha Baron Cohen in Disclaimer. Credit: Apple TV+ Privilege in every form, whether wealth, status, or the certainty that you have nothing left to lose, is forensically examined.
That begins with Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett), an acclaimed British documentary journalist, whose dedication to her work has come ahead of her husband, Robert (Baron Cohen), and the son she’s just pushed out of the family nest, Nicholas (Smit-McPhee). But her veneer fractures as soon as she receives The Perfect Stranger , a novel in which Catherine recognises her own life. She throws up reading it.
Whether it’s the one-shot action sequences in Children of Men or the granular emotions writ large of Roma , Cuaron has always pushed at form and genre. Here he twists narrative and perspective. There is Catherine’s story, but also that.