We are in the midst of a Shyamalanaissance. While responses to M. Night Shyamalan’s filmography have waxed and waned since he was first designated the Alfred Hitchcock of the new century, his latest, Trap, seems to have newly reestablished his reputation as a master of the crowd-pleasing, expertly crafted original thriller—a dying breed. I’ve been thinking a lot about Shyamalan recently, because I’ve been watching Disclaimer, the new Apple TV+ miniseries from Shyamalan’s contemporary Alfonso Cuarón.
Disclaimer reminds me, in good and bad ways, of my favorite of Shyamalan’s films, The Village. The Village tells the story of an isolated community in an unspecified olden time, cut off from the rest of the world by a terrifying, mysterious beast who patrols the forest surrounding their village. It’s incredibly suspenseful, visually stunning, and it skillfully manages a tenuous tonal balance between world-consuming dread and breathless romance. Its one flaw is that its dialogue is atrocious. Just the worst, most contrived Ye Olde lines you can imagine. Not even extraordinary actors like Joaquin Phoenix, William Hurt, and Cherry Jones can keep the stiltedness from becoming distracting. But, it turns out, that’s the point. At the risk of spoiling a 20-year-old movie, what we eventually learn is that the film is actually set in the present.
The village is a community of people who, sometime in the 1980s, built a commune in a remote area of Pennsylvania and decided to live off the grid in the manner of early American settlers. The beast is a fiction meant to prevent their now-grown children from leaving the grounds and realizing what’s going on. The characters seem as if they’re being played by bad actors because the characters themselves are bad actors.
The risk Shyamalan took in structuring his film in this way is that he asked viewers to sit through something that was a little bit wooden, a little bit contrived, a little bit, well, bad, to vouchsafe a payoff that would make everything make sense. I loved the audacity of this choice, the sheer genius stupidity of it, and, as a result, it’s a film I’ve returned to many times over the years with great delight. For a tight 108 minutes, this is a bargain I am very willing to take, a con I am more than willing to walk right into.
Disclaimer is a bit of a con, too. I’m officially not at liberty to disclose what happens at the end of this series, though readers of the breakout sensation novel upon which it is based will be familiar with the story’s twists and turns. At base, Disclaimer tells the story of Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), a renowned documentary filmmaker who lives a life of comfort and wealth with her husband and grown son in London. One day, she receives a self-published novel that she immediately recognizes as a thinly veiled roman à clef about a traumatic, secret event from her youth—an event that resulted in the death of a young man she met on vacation in Italy. The source of the book, we learn, is that young man’s father, Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), who is now plotting revenge against Catherine for her apparent complicity in, or even responsibility for, the death of his son those many years ago.
It should not be a spoiler to reveal that all is not as it seems in Disclaimer. There is a revelation very late in the series that will upend everything we’ve been led to believe about the events on our screens, and we’ll need, ultimately, to ask ourselves why we were so ready to believe certain versions of the truth but not others. What do we do with a show that hides its true self from us? In a film, we have only the length of our time in the theater to inhabit a blinkered world before its truth is revealed to us. Disclaimer, which stretches for seven episodes, asks us instead to live in the lie, to build identifications with characters in the lie, to have emotional responses, to laugh at jokes, to spend time in the lie. For all its exquisite performances, visual pyrotechnics, and narrative contraptions, Disclaimer never fully earns, or maybe even deserves, our trust. Cuarón cleverly and convincingly tells us that nobody really understands Catherine Ravenscroft. I’m not sure Disclaimer understands her either.
One of the first lines in Disclaimer comes from a speech in honor of Ravenscroft’s work as a filmmaker. “Beware of narrative and form,” the voice says. “Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate.” Cuarón’s televisual version of Ravenscroft’s story plays fast and loose with these dangerous elements of narrative and form. In many ways, it is a refreshingly energetic TV debut for an accomplished filmmaker. Rather than labor to make the medium more “cinematic,” Cuarón embraces the narrative expansiveness and time afforded by serialized storytelling. Cuarón’s visual signatures remain in force—lots of long tracking shots!—and there is a good bit of art film ponderousness, but, at its heart, this is avowedly a TV melodrama, and, in its best moments, that’s precisely how it plays.
A kind of chopped and screwed Rashomon, the series is built around three different narrative contrivances that interweave throughout every episode. There’s the narrative of Ravenscroft, in the present, dealing with the earth-shattering effects of this novel in her life. Her husband and son process the shock with varying degrees of hysteria, and Ravenscroft herself spirals out of control. This thread is narrated in second-person voice-over by the actress Indira Varma, and it goes out of its way to show us how Ravenscroft is suffocated by this sudden life twist. (At one point, she impulsively strikes a co-worker, and her assistant, in perhaps the year’s most ham-fisted line of dialogue, shouts, “You are so canceled, Catherine!”) This section houses Blanchett’s molten performance, but it also showcases some of the limited series’ most limited ideas about gender (masculinity, in particular, in the form of Ravenscroft’s effete doofus husband and her detached, drug addict son), cancel culture, marriage, and parenting. That said, the pleasure of watching Cate Blanchett shop for, prepare, and summarily throw away an elaborate meal of sole meunière might be worth the cost of admission.
The second narrative is that of Brigstocke plotting and executing his scheme in the present. Kevin Kline, a great American actor in search of a showcase role on TV, regrettably does not find one here. Playing a kind of perverse twist on the inspirational boarding school teacher from The Emperor’s Club, Kline seems less like he’s embodying a character than like he’s doing a bit. Every time a new part of his plot snaps into place, for instance, Brigstocke mimes arming a grenade and throwing it over his shoulder, softly cackling with glee. Narrated in voice-over by Kline, sounding like an emeritus professor from Hogwarts after a few too many pints of butter beer, the segment has a cartoonishness that sits uneasily alongside Ravenscroft’s narrative.
Finally, there’s the flashback narrative, the vignette-style retelling of the events from Ravenscroft’s youth as represented in the mysterious novel. This sequence unfolds as a kind of romantic, new wave romp on the Italian coast. Brigstocke’s son (Louis Partridge) loafs his way through cobblestone squares and down the picturesque beach, eventually running into a young Catherine Ravenscroft (Leila George) and undertaking an erotic voyage that Cuarón stages at length and in relatively startling detail. The gauzy quality of these scenes, as well as their sleepless horniness, suggest nostalgia. And while they lack the firm narrative identification that the show’s dueling voice-overs provide in the other sections, it gradually becomes clear that these sun-swept recollections are also subject to bias, prejudice, false memory.
Whether these three narratives are competing, contradictory, or merely emerging from different perspectives is the central question of the show. And Cuarón skips fleetly between them. One of my favorite sequences in the series begins in Ravenscroft’s narrative, as she tries to figure out a way to prevent Brigstocke from further circulating the novel but without upsetting him. She drafts and then almost too professionally delivers a speech about how much she liked and respected the novel, a speech that manages to be both obsequious and condescending, into Brigstocke’s answering machine. Her easy facility with bullshit, her first turn to thin flattery as a defense, tells us a great deal about her panicked hope that this act was one of ego, rather than evil.
It also reveals something of how she approaches her relationships with other people: making first concessions, letting moronic men feel in control. But we hear the voicemail recorded live from Brigstocke’s perspective, and, likewise, his reaction—offense, even giddiness at seeming to have been proved right—and this is revealing. That Ravenscroft would think a speech like this would mollify him only confirms Brigstocke’s suspicion of her villainy. But, as is often the case in this show, what seems like a misunderstanding on the part of one character will eventually be revealed as a misunderstanding on the part of the viewer. It’s a misunderstanding we have no power or information to correct—a misunderstanding the show, indeed, insists we have—but it’s a misunderstanding, a misjudgment, all the same.
There’s something wrong with Disclaimer. The show never gives us enough clues to solve the puzzle, but it does create a feeling that something important remains unsolved. Cuarón keeps the viewer in near-constant discomfort, his show in a constant state of instability. An off-putting smoothness pervades the production. The series zeroes in on its own artificiality, particularly through its management and differentiation of the three separate narrative lines. Cuarón signals the flashback timeline, for instance, with a distinctively retro iris in, iris out transition. These scenes are color-corrected quite differently and even seem to be filmed on a different stock. The dialogue in these sequences also features what sounds to the ear like slightly awkward dubbing, with lines sometimes not quite matching mouths. The two “present” timelines are also somewhat misaligned. Despite nominally occurring simultaneously, sometimes they’ll be slightly off. We might witness an event in one timeline and then check in with the other timeline only slightly before it. There’s no real reason for this to occur, just a momentary stutter in the film’s narrative address.
One character is shot, repeatedly and exclusively, with the use of almost random, off-rhythm zooms. Sometimes they seem tied to a heartbeat, sometimes they seem syncopated to some unheard music. There are several ordinary conversation scenes in which the camera jitters, not producing a handheld verité effect, but as if a camera operator were intentionally adjusting the apparatus. Leila George, who plays the young Ravenscroft, is by no means impersonating Cate Blanchett, but every so often she’ll utter a word or phrase in such distinctly Blanchettian dialect you’ll get a chill. Some of these disunities are small enough that they might even read initially as mistakes, but, with enough of them in line together, it’s clear that Cuarón is using these techniques to unsettle the viewer. M. Night Shyamalan made his actors act as if they were acting in order to set up a devastating and clever twist; the reason Cuarón is destabilizing the visual and sonic world of his series turns out to be much more grave, much more laden with lessons about the world. But, in the end, I’m not sure which trick made me feel sillier.
There’s a great joke on 30 Rock that the vacuous C-list celebrity Jenna Maroney went to acting school at the “Royal Tampa Academy of Dramatic Tricks.” It seems that, recently, a not-insignificant number of television creators may also be alumni. The trick I’m thinking about in particular is not dissimilar to the one Shyamalan pulls off in The Village, the idea that the story you see and believe in is eventually revealed to be a mere distraction from reality, a disguise that the truth is wearing. The viewer is so immersed in the show’s narrative voice, they’d never guess they were being fooled until that fact is deliberately revealed.
Several recent series have taken this basic format and used it to tell stories and to level criticisms about the way women’s voices are drowned out, ignored, or simply silenced, even and especially in media contexts where they might otherwise seem front and center. Disclaimer is the most recent and high-profile example, but it shares a structure and a philosophy with other similar series like FX’s Fleishman Is in Trouble and Apple TV+’s own The Changeling. It’s not just that they share late-breaking, paradigm-shifting narrative twists, but that those twists are tethered to the previously unheard, or at least unconsidered, perspectives of female characters. To pull off this trick, these series have to create narrative worlds that also don’t care about these women, often for many, many hours. Disclaimer, along with these other series, commits the sin in order to eventually point a finger at us viewers for committing it, too.
There is great value and meaningful insight in series like these that depict the warped inattention through which men are often allowed to perceive the world. Catherine Ravenscroft deserves her own say the same as Rachel Fleishman did. That these acts of empowerment must also be acts of valediction—narrative gotchas at the end of these series—suggests that the series themselves don’t take those voices terribly seriously. Early in the show’s final episode, as Ravenscroft begins the long monologue that unravels everything we’ve seen in the six hours previous, Brigstocke interrupts her. Ravenscroft booms back: “Shut up, I’m talking!” It’s addressed as much to Brigstocke as it is to us, to Cuarón. Disclaimer is a story about a woman who is never ever listened to by the men in her life. And it seems, sometimes, that Cuarón would rather tell a polemical story about the injustice of that inattention, to indict the galleries of men who ignore her, to show the audience its own complicity, than just let her speak.
