Directed and written by Alfonso Cuarón, Disclaimer is a brilliant miniseries, if not the best of the entire year so far. Marking the director’s return to television after 10 years, the Apple TV series is a beautifully shot and masterfully crafted product.
★★★★★
Disclaimer begins with Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), a famous documentary filmmaker who seems to have everything she wants: a successful career, a beautiful house, and a loving family made up of her husband Robert (Sasha Baron Cohen) and their son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee). But everything comes crumbling down when she receives a book written by Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Koine) whose plot narrates the memory of a summer in Italy Catherine would have rather kept hidden and forgotten in her mind.
Led by an incredible Cate Blanchett who delivers an emotional and powerful performance as Catherine, the entire cast of Disclaimer is very strong in all their respective roles as well as together when the series showcases the family dynamic and interactions between these characters. Sacha Baron Cohen is also excellent as Robert, whose inner turmoil drives some of the middle episodes of the show. But he especially shines in his scenes opposite Blanchett where the two actors perfectly match each other’s anger and disappointment, leaving viewers wondering who they should root for.
“Photographs are not reality… they are fragments of reality,” states one character during Disclaimer. The show is constantly inviting us to question the reality and authenticity of what we are seeing. As the series goes on, we can’t help but wonder if what is being narrated in the book – shown to the audience through the flashback – is really the truth. Therefore, the TV show invites a poignant commentary on whether or not we can trust something seemingly as irrefutable as photographic evidence to tell us the whole story.
The commentary on photographs is also mirrored by a veiled but interesting reflection on social media and the role it plays in the younger generation’s life in the show. If the photos themselves are not the truth, then the same applies to social media, which is even less reliable as a medium. The use of flashback is also fascinating in Disclaimer as it is through those scenes that the audience is first introduced to the story as well as the way the past storyline unfolds paralleled by events in the present.
Twist and turns leave the audience guessing for the entirety of the show’s runtime, questioning when they will ever find out the full extent of what happened that summer in Italy. Disclaimer surprises its audience until the very last episode, but at the end, the viewers soon realise that the truth was in front of their eyes all along, if only they had been willing to look. Admittedly, the biggest twist in the reversal of the past story can be predictable on some level, but that does not take anything away from the ending of the show. Overall, the show’s structure is best suited for the weekly release television format that seems to be making a comeback in the past year or so. While the second half of the show may be slightly rushed in concluding the characters’ arcs, it still works.
With a director as creative and imaginative as Cuarón, it is a shame that Disclaimer is relegated to the smaller screen. Audiences that have had the pleasure of viewing the series on the big screen – for example, at the Venice Film Festival where it premiered – would agree that the stunning cinematography is one of the most impressive elements of the entire show. With its very distinctive light and quality to the flashback scenes and a much colder and realistic approach to the present-day ones, Cuarón’s strong directorial voice guides us through the non-linear narrative, without needing to necessarily signpost the timeline with intertitles or on-screen writing.
The Verdict
With its multi-point-of-view narrative and incredibly destabilising twist, Disclaimer will keep the audience hooked to the screen until its very last episode, desperate to uncover the tangled web that is presented in front of us and learn the truth that all its characters are so desperately seeking whilst simultaneously keeping hidden.
Words by Clotilde Chinnici
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