Disclaimer review: Cate Blanchett gives an 'increasingly frenzied' performance in this 'engrossing' revenge thriller

Apple TV+'s latest starry drama sees the Oscar-winner play a famous journalist terrorised by a vindictive man via a self-published novel. It's intelligent and beautifully shot.

In Alfonso Cuarón's most dazzling films, including Children of Men, he trusts his audience to follow his lead, however winding the narrative path. That approach shines through in Disclaimer, a twisting series that takes on the eternal yet timelier-than-ever subject of fiction v reality. Cate Blanchett stars in the juicy role of Catherine Ravenscroft, a famous investigative journalist who is anonymously sent a novel in which she is, unmistakably, a scandalous character. Disclaimer doesn't have anything new to say about how our imaginations fill in the blanks of reality, but Cuarón and Blanchett make the series an engrossing, intelligent romp.

Cuarón wrote and directed all seven episodes, and slows the pace from its source, the 2015 novel by Renée Knight. The story flashes back and forth in time, gradually filling in details, at first with some deliberate confusion. We see a young couple having sex on a train travelling in Europe, but don't yet know who they are. Soon we meet a retired London teacher with the suitably fussy name Stephen Brigstocke, played by Kevin Kline with devilish glee. Stephen has just discovered a novel written by his late wife. Recognising Catherine in it, he has the book self-published under a pseudonym and mailed to her, with the disclaimer usually found in fiction altered to read: "Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence".

Catherine is not the most challenging role Blanchett has ever played, but she is, as always, enormously convincing, ramping up Catherine's distress with each turn of the screw from Stephen as he threatens to ruin her life. He blames her for a tragedy that touched him, and, out for revenge, follows up by sending her photos even more explosive than the novel. Blanchett navigates the performance beautifully. Catherine becomes increasingly frenzied, yet remains sympathetic in her desperation, no matter how badly she might – or might not – have behaved years before.

Kline plays Stephen with great precision. He is full of grief for his wife, who died nine years ago, and wanders around wearing her worn-out pink cardigan. But he is also mean-spirited about his former students. As his scheme goes on we see him masquerade as a pathetic old man when it suits him, only to turn his back and show a sly grin that gives the game away. Stephen becomes reprehensible, yet Kline is always intriguing to watch. Kodi Smit-McPhee is touching as Catherine's aimless, unhappy son. A miscast Sacha Baron Cohen, in what looks like an unfathomably bad wig, plays her husband, Robert. His stiff performance makes Robert more of a gullible dolt than he's meant to be.

The first section of the series lays out the revenge plot, and Catherine's efforts to find –  and then silence – Stephen. Much of the middle section is given to flashbacks, and many of those take place in Italy. The great cinematographers Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel create a gauzy, enticing look there, but they make even the rainiest London days look glowing.  

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Lesley Manville is heartbreaking as Stephen's wife, Nancy, who spirals downwards into a lasting depression after the death of their teenage son, Jonathan (Louis Partridge). Other flashbacks play out scenes from Nancy's novel, with Leila George as a younger Catherine. That middle section is also the sexy part of the show, a reminder that Cuarón has been a master of simmering eroticism going back to Y Tu Mamá También (2001). Here he makes words and glances steamy. But Nancy could not possibly have witnessed everything she put in the novel, and Cuarón's story becomes even more teasing.

In voiceover, we often hear Stephen explain his plans, a first-person narration that works because he seems to be addressing us, making us complicit in his scheme. But an alternating narration from Catherine's point of view in which a disembodied voice (Indira Varma) addresses her as "you", is just annoying. When a distraught Catherine looks in the mirror after reading the novel we hear, "You have seen this face before. You hoped never to see it again. Your mask has fallen."  Blanchett lets us see what Catherine is feeling. There's no need to explain her thoughts.  

Narrators are unreliable and memories are subjective, in fiction and reality. Why it takes some characters in Disclaimer so long to figure that out is a bit of a head-scratcher. That hardly matters, though, as Cuarón leads us through this constantly intriguing maze of possibilities.  

★★★★☆

Disclaimer is available now on Apple TV+ internationally

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