David Farnor | On 13, Oct 2024

“Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.” Those are the words that begin The Perfect Stranger, a book at the heart of Disclaimer, Alfonso Cuarón’s new series for Apple TV+. The seven-part thriller, based on the novel of the same name by Renée Knight, follows the impact of that disclaimer-carrying book, which lands in the middle of Catherine’s (Cate Blanchett) life – and threatens to detonate it entirely.

Catherine is a journalist who has just received an award for her career of exposing lies and misdeeds. But The Perfect Stranger promises to do the same thing to her. Her misdeed? It involves something to do with a boy on an Italian beach several decades ago. Flashbacks to that beach repeatedly punctuate the story, as we see Jonathan (Louis Partridge) come across a younger, more vibrant incarnation of Catherine (Leila George). Photographs taken by Jonathan – which are surprisingly candid – emerge, telling their own story of their summertime encounter.

The book, and the photos, are both the brainchild of Stephen (Kevin Kline), who lost his wife, Nancy (Lesley Manville), several years ago and is out for revenge. We know this because he has conversations about it with his friend, Justin (Art Malik), who has his own unlikely fantasies of becoming some kind of independent book publisher. Unfortunately, those fantasies aren’t the only unrealistic thing on offer.

Alfonso Cuarón is a master of cinematic storytelling, capable of crafting stunning, artful imagery while capturing the most intimate moments of human existence. Here, he makes his small screen debut. While his gorgeous imagery is in tact – a sun-dappled past and the playful use of iris wipes echo the photographic memories of the besotted Jonathan, contrasting starkly with the clinical, soulless present day – his storytelling is sadly adrift from the narrative shore.

The opening episodes flit between each perspective on events in at attempt to conjure up mystery and intrigue, but leave the wider story feeling fragmented and fleeting, as each strand fails to grab our attention – or, crucially, our sympathy. The cast are uniformly excellent, in particular Kevin Kline balancing understated grief with a knowing English accent as his calculating avenger inveigles his way into Catherine’s life without anyone knowing. A sequence in which he buys a vacuum cleaner from her son, Nicholas (an underused Kodi Smit-McPhee), is gleefully awkward. Sacha Baron Cohen is unrecognisable as Rob, a self-centred and shallow man who can’t bear the idea of being humiliated. And Cate Blanchett portrays the icy matriarch slowly coming undone with all the composure of, well, Cate Blanchett portraying an icy matriarch slowly coming undone.

But none of the actors are given remotely credible things to say or do, whether it’s Catherine’s suspicious burning of the book that arrives on their doorstep, Stephen’s on-the-nose rants about vengeance, or Rob’s bullying of his son, who has disappointed him by working in a vacuum cleaner store. Why has it Stephen so long to start learning about what happened and caring about how to remedy it? Why is Nick so clueless about The Perfect Stranger’s contents, when it’s supposedly so obvious and incendiary?

The script doesn’t help by saturating everything in endless voiceovers – both the second-person narration from Indira Varma and the first-person commentary from Kline only separate the audience from a story that would come alive if given room for the characters to breath. As it is, with its glacial pacing, it’s a tedious montage of telling rather than showing – precisely the opposite of what you’d expect from Cuarón’s sensitive storytelling. By deliberately keeping information from the viewer, to try and spark curiosity, we can’t enjoy things from the distance the show creates – the result leaves us wanting to read the novel at the heart of the programme instead. Rather than plumb the depths of dark secrets with the juicy promise of the story-with-a-story, Disclaimer becomes a meta-thriller about storytelling that is all surface and no layers.

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