Disclaimer Review: A Lush, Beautiful, and Almost Entirely Hollow Exploration of Perception

Apple TV+’s Disclaimer is probably the most technically beautiful show you’ll watch this year.

Every shot is gorgeous, with characters glowingly limned in light and roving camera work illustrating transitions between scenes and timelines with cinematic flair. But the glossiness of its packaging is desperately trying to disguise a key truth: Disclaimer is a tepid, below-average revenge thriller pretending to wrestle with provocative issues that other series have done better.

The drama hails from Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuarón, who has helmed such visually striking and intellectually thoughtful projects as Children of Men, Gravity, and Roma. But his first foray into serialized storytelling is a miss.

Featuring an absolutely stacked cast of A-list performers, Disclaimer is the sort of series that desperately wants to ignore the fact that it’s a television show. A throwback to the early Peak TV idea of TV series secretly being seven-hour movies, it’s a show that luxuriates in its extended runtime and high-end feel.

But its pacing frequently drags and its pretentious insistence on its own importance becomes exhausting well before the more interesting revelations of its final act arrive. 

In the most basic sense, Disclaimer follows the story of two families whose lives have been forever linked by tragedy.  

Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) is a brilliant documentary filmmaker with a seemingly perfect life. Successful and rich, she lives in a ridiculously opulent home that screams wealth and privilege. (Her kitchen! My goodness!)

She’s got a boring, but successful husband named Robert (a wildly miscast Sacha Baron Cohen), and an underachieving dirtbag of a son named Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who treats both his parents as though they’re janitorial staff. Living the dream!

But once, several decades prior, Catherine and her family went on holiday to Venice, where she became secretly entangled with a much younger man named Jonathan (Louis Partridge). What happened between them is initially hazy, but the upshot is that the boy died in Italy, and Catherine never told anyone about it. 

Jonathan’s father, Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), has never stopped blaming Catherine for his son’s death.

So when he discovers a manuscript his now-dead wife Nancy wrote before she passed, crafting a story that portrays Catherine as a dangerous predator who let Jonathan die, he self-publishes it, eager for his shot at revenge at last. 

Spanning multiple timelines and featuring three different narrators, Disclaimer follows both Stephen’s gleeful plot to ruin Catherine and her desperate attempt to hold her life and reputation together. (How everyone immediately recognizes the Catherine of The Perfect Stranger as the real-life Catherine Ravenscroft is a plot detail the episodes largely gloss over.) 

Interspersed throughout their scenes are a series of sun-drenched flashbacks to the Italy of two decades prior, and Catherine and Jonathan’s affair.

For a series that purports to be a psychological thriller, there’s not a ton about Disclaimer that’s genuinely mysterious. You’ll guess most of its supposed twists long before they happen and there’s not much here that won’t be familiar to folks who have watched any sort of “families with dark secrets that come to light” dramas in recent years.

The show also isn’t at all subtle about the fact that we probably shouldn’t trust most of what we see.

But for all its insistence that ith show is really a story about the stories we tell ourselves and how we choose to remember the past, particularly when it involves those we love, the message never coalesces into anything truly meaningful.

The idea of the unreliable narrator is hardly uncommon in the world of prestige TV—see also The Undoing or Sharp Objects—but Disclaimer’s attempt to complicate the stories its various characters are telling is often hampered by the fact that every one of its primary figures is generally tedious and awful. 

Catherine is a snob, Robert is judgemental and selfish, Nicholas is every rebellious teen archetype you’ve ever come across on television, from his inability to hold down a job and obsession with Instagram to his interest in drugs. 

As for Stephen, he’s a bitter old man who seems to be doing little beyond waiting to die before he discovers Nancy’s manuscript, and immediately switches into peak A from Pretty Little Liars mode.

Though, to be fair, his wildly over complicated scheme to ruin Catherine’s life does give him a sort of joie de vivre we’ve never seen from him before. 

Disclaimer offers us precious little reason to truly care about any of these people, or to favor one’s version of the truth over another.

Even as the narrative touches on a handful of interesting themes—the class tension between the obnoxiously rich Ravenscrofts and the clearly impoverished Stephen, the cancel culture frenzy that surrounds Catherine’s public fall from grace—they don’t really go anywhere, and there’s little tangible interest in what they mean.

The show’s dialogue is also painfully basic, and it often deliberately undercuts anything that might be mistaken for subtlety—a scene in which Kline’s Stephen mimes throwing a grenade to illustrate how he’s blowing up Catherine’s life is but one example. And its near-constant use of voiceovers to explain the basics we’re seeing onscreen is clumsy and unfun.

To their credit, Blanchett, Kline, and a truly astonishing Lesley Manville (who briefly plays Jonathan’s wildly grieving mother Nancy) turn in stellar performances throughout Disclaimer’s seven episodes. 

Kline is clearly having a blast chewing the scenery as Stephen at his most unhinged, creeping around his dilapidated house wearing his dead wife’s favorite cardigan.

Blanchett’s work is more subtle, perhaps because much of Catherine’s anguish is conveyed through changes in facial expression and body language. But her big monologue at the end seems destined for an Emmy reel.

There is also a pair of truly excellent cats, and the feline members of the Brigstocke and Ravenscroft households repeatedly steal all the scenes in which they appear. 

But at the end of the day, while Disclaimer’s final hours do ramp up the tension in a way that gives the story’s conclusion some intriguing tension, by the time its final twists are revealed—from an extended act of horrific violence to a murder attempt—you may find yourself wondering what this was all for. 

Disclaimer is now streaming on Apple TV+. 

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