With its stellar cast, Disclaimer’s twists will tie you in knots
Disclaimer ★★★★½
Apple TV+, Friday
It’s a staggering collection of talent. Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, writing and directing in full a limited series starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Kodi Smitt-McPhee. But as exquisitely as this psychological thriller is made – sublime technical aspects made me gasp – it’s intently focused on drawing out every seething facet in Renee Knight’s 2015 novel of the same title. Emotionally visceral, Disclaimer carves out the flaws in its adversarial Londoners: parenting corrupts, forgiveness is a weapon, and self-deception comforts.
Cate Blanchett and Sacha Baron Cohen in Disclaimer.Credit: Apple TV+
Privilege in every form, whether wealth, status, or the certainty that you have nothing left to lose, is forensically examined. That begins with Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett), an acclaimed British documentary journalist, whose dedication to her work has come ahead of her husband, Robert (Baron Cohen), and the son she’s just pushed out of the family nest, Nicholas (Smit-McPhee). But her veneer fractures as soon as she receives The Perfect Stranger, a novel in which Catherine recognises her own life. She throws up reading it.
Whether it’s the one-shot action sequences in Children of Men or the granular emotions writ large of Roma, Cuaron has always pushed at form and genre. Here he twists narrative and perspective. There is Catherine’s story, but also that of Stephen Brigstocke (Kline), a retired school teacher who has lost everyone he loved and blames Catherine, and also the story told by the anonymous author in The Perfect Stranger, which unfolds on the Italian holiday of a young man, Jonathan (Louis Partridge).
Of course everything is connected, but Cuaron is not interested in drawing out the reveals. The story moves more quickly than you expect so that the ramifications loom from early on in the seven episodes. A variety of narrators, voiced by characters plus one omnipotent observer (Indira Varma), offer withering judgments. When a rattled Catherine goes to her local bookshop it’s because, “you want to kill some time in a place where you’re admired”. The cinematic compositions are masterful, but they’re also meant to calm your doubts about the plot’s uncertainties.
Kevin Kline as retired school teacher Stephen Brigstocke in DisclaimerCredit: Apple TV+
Blanchett plays Catherine as a brittle, pious, and initially reactive force; you want to judge her before she’s had her say. Into the space her character leaves steps Stephen, who with his Dickensian tufts of hair and malignant presence is magnetic, and Lesley Manville, as Stephen’s late wife, Nancy. Their marriage, like Catherine and Robert’s, is riven with unspoken accommodations that distort the truth. Nothing is absolute – pain can be staggering, but also a shortcut to petty vindictiveness. Disclaimer is not only compelling, its best twists tie the audience in knots.
Don Johnson, Joshua Jackson, Phillipa Soo and Sean Teale in Doctor Odyssey. Credit: Disney+
Doctor Odyssey ★★★
Disney+
Is it Grey’s Anatomy at sea? A medical drama set on a cruise ship, Doctor Odyssey deftly packs a great deal into its network-friendly 43-minute episodes. It has a silly but serendipitous feel – the ludicrousness comes with small risk and significant chemistry as one-time Dawson’s Creek teen Joshua Jackson strolls into his handsome fortysomething era: a hint of grey at the temples, snug white pants, and the ability to sound authoritative while referencing “the sternoclavicular joint”.
Jackson plays the wildly overqualified Dr Max Bankman, who has taken the ship’s doctor gig on the luxury liner Odyssey because he wants to loosen up and enjoy life. Soon he’s exchanging significant glances with his nurse practitioner, Avery Morgan (Phillipa Soo), and learning how over-consumption of shrimp can lead to iodine poisoning. He still has time to wear black tie to dinner with the ship’s demanding captain, Robert Massey (Don Johnson).
The show’s creators include the prolific Ryan Murphy and Jon Robin Baitz, who last collaborated on Feud: Capote vs. The Swans. The elements suggest a strange grab bag of influences, as a passenger suffering a penile fracture is pure Murphy while the use of big-name weekly guest stars is a throwback to The Love Boat. Saving lives and smooching has long been television’s go-to prescription, and Doctor Odyssey knowingly updates that with a light touch.
Frank Dillane as Boise and Sophie Turner as Joan.Credit: Stan
Joan
Stan
Are we in the golden age of 1980s British crime dramas? Following in the footsteps of Paramount+’s The Gold, this six-part limited series inspired by real life events rolls through the transformation of Joan Hannington (Sophie Turner), a young mother who flees her own abusive mother and reinvents herself as a daring jewel thief to fund a new life for her young daughter. It’s a canny mix of criminal aspiration, period glamour, and maternal resilience, so that risk and reward become dangerously intertwined in Turner’s compelling performance.
Will Ferrell and Harper Steele in Will & Harper.Credit: Netflix via AP
Will & Harper
Netflix
Made as broadly and warmly as possible to impact a mainstream audience, this road trip documentary charts a journey across America by comic actor Will Ferrell and his longtime friend and writing partner Harper Steele, who in 2022 began her gender transition. The aim is to show conservative America they have nothing to fear from trans people, and to reassure Steele that conservative Americans won’t physically harm her. The presence of Ferrell and director Josh Greenbaum’s documentary crew is obviously a safety net, but nonetheless this is mostly a feel-good affirmation.
Apartment 7A
Binge
The Australian filmmaker Natalie Erika James, who had a breakthrough success with the 2020 Stan horror film Relic, does as well as possible within the straitjacketed confines of this Hollywood prequel to the masterful 1968 classic Rosemary’s Baby. Ozark’s Julia Garner plays Terry Gionoffrio, a briefly seen character in the original film whose story is expanded as a struggling former dancer living in the ominous Bramford apartment building. Dianne Wiest and Kevin McNally take over as Rosemary’s interfering neighbours, the Castevets, as this supernatural thriller struggles to distinguish itself.
Occupied City
DocPlay
British visual artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen (Hunger, 12 Years a Slave) has always had formalist underpinnings to this work, but they’re foregrounded in this epic four-hour documentary that attempts to dissolve the barriers between the past and the present in this rollcall of life in Amsterdam, McQueen’s adopted home, during the World War II occupation by Nazi Germany. As a Holocaust story focusing on the fate of the city’s Jewish population and eschewing archival footage, the feature is more about repetition than testimony. Narrator Melanie Hyams’ recounting of individual lives aims for an accumulative force.
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