Disclaimer Premiere Recap: Cate Blanchett’s Catherine Is Haunted by Ghosts From Her Past (Plus, Grade It!)
Oscar winner Cate Blanchett stars in Apple TV+’s new thriller Disclaimer as Catherine, a journalist who makes a living exposing important people’s secrets. But in the premiere, a few secrets from her own past are coming to light.
Friday’s premiere starts out with a young couple making love on a train on their way to Venice. We then cut to a swanky awards ceremony, where Catherine is being honored by Christiane Amanpour (!) for her illustrious journalism career. She’s accompanied by her adoring husband Robert, played (curiously) by Sacha Baron Cohen. We also meet Stephen (Kevin Kline), a grumpy old professor at a boys’ school who admits he’s “tired of teaching,” calling his students “spoiled little brats.” He’s disciplined for writing “concerning” things on a student’s essay, but he doesn’t even bother to defend himself. Then we go back to the young couple marveling at the sights in Venice — and based on the camera the boy is using, we’re guessing this is a flashback.
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While Catherine and Robert go home to celebrate her victory with an expensive bottle of wine, Stephen watches as charity workers clear out the belongings of his late wife, who died nine years ago. (He keeps her favorite cardigan, wearing it himself around the house.) As Robert heads to bed, Catherine opens a package addressed to her. It’s a book, titled The Perfect Stranger and dedicated to “my son, Jonathan.” It comes with a disclaimer, too: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.” As we flash back to the young lovers taking a romantic gondola ride through Venice, and Stephen wanders his house dressed in his wife’s cardigan, weeping when he finds a bit of her old lipstick, Catherine stays up late reading The Perfect Stranger — and she’s so shaken by what she reads, she vomits in the toilet. “Your mask has fallen,” the narrator declares.
A grief-stricken Stephen happens upon some old photos as well: They’re of the young lovers we’ve seen in flashback, and he smiles in recognition, so they’re connected to him somehow. But then he sees more photos of a young blonde woman in various states of undress, and his smile fades. Now he’s angry: “I knew that woman,” he narrates, but “until then, I had thought she was just an innocent bystander in my life’s demise.” His son died, he explains, and his wife kept the boy’s bedroom like a shrine, spending all her time in there. He opens a desk drawer and discovers a typed manuscript. It’s The Perfect Stranger… written by his wife, Nancy. Catherine, meanwhile, is so disturbed by the book, she sets fire to it in her kitchen. “It’s about me… I think I’m being punished,” she tells her husband. She’s not named in it, but it’s clearly about “something that happened to me years ago,” she insists — something she’s not willing to share just yet.
In the flashback, the young lovers are forced to part when the girl learns her aunt was killed in an accident. She heads home, leaving the boy in Italy by himself. In present day, Stephen’s friend congratulates him on the book and encourages him to self-publish it. Stephen asks him about one particular character: “Do you think she got what she deserved?” The friend admits, “I wasn’t sorry when it happened.” Meanwhile, Catherine helps her twentysomething son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee) move out of their house into an apartment, but he resents being kicked out; he’s much closer with his father than with her. Back in the flashback, the boy travels to Pisa by himself, taking photos and writing home to his mother before heading to the beach. He signs the letter Jonathan… so he must be Stephen and Nancy’s late son.
Stephen’s friend presents him with copies of the book, credited to the pseudonym EJ Preston, and he thinks they could become independent publishers starting with this, but “there was only one reader I wanted to reach,” Stephen tells us. While Catherine is helping her son Nicholas, she learns he’s received the book, too — and he read it already. He liked it because the woman died at the end, he says: “She deserved it, too. She was a selfish bitch.” And in the flashback, Jonathan lies alone on the beach when he notices a young blonde woman playing with her son… whose name is Nicholas. He’s mesmerized by her beauty, and as he takes photos of her from afar, the blonde woman — a young Catherine, it seems — gives him a coy smile.
Are you already hooked by Disclaimer? Give the premiere a grade in our poll, and hit the comments to share your thoughts and theories.
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