‘Disclaimer’ Review: Episode 5 Creates a Little Clarity by Considering Who’s Being Kept Quiet — Spoilers
[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “Disclaimer” Episode 5 (“V”).]
Throughout the first four episodes of “Disclaimer,” we’ve noted how little Catherine (Cate Blanchett) has been able to speak for herself. The award-winning documentarian has yet to voice her version of the events depicted in Nancy’s (Lesley Manville) book — her attempts repeatedly suppressed as others rush to judgment. Mr. Ravenscroft (Sacha Baron Cohen) is so upset by what he reads about his wife’s alleged affair that he flees their home before evicting her from it. This week, in Episode 5 (“V”), her colleagues have a similar reaction — choosing first to believe the tidbits teased by Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), and then elevating his printed accusations to emergency status (purportedly out of fear for the company’s reputation). Stephen won’t even hear from Catherine — ignoring her calls, hiding from her in his own home while she peeps through the mail slot, the cowardly professor’s dodgy evasion coming to represent the show’s own refusal to let Catherine speak.
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For most of these scenes, writer and director Alfonso Cuarón seems to be replicating the flurry of fear and embarrassment that tends to accompany public indictments in the day and age of social media. Long before Jisoo (HoYeon) screams, “You’re so canceled, Catherine,” it’s been evident that the world is gathering its tar and feathers to toss on our prime subject (suspect?). This is the way these matters tend to go, after all. Rumors spread quickly. Judgments are cast soon after. Neither are refuted or corrected with the same vigor and enthusiasm seen when the seed of scandal is first set.
Still, despite the whirlwind Cuarón has conducted thus far — sweeping Catherine up in a dizzying, discombobulating storm cloud from which she can’t yet see out — his initial warning may have tipped “Disclaimer’s” hand. “Beware of narrative and form,” we were told from the beginning. “Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate.” While past episodes coerced us into believing one thing or another, feeling this way or that way, Episode 5 tips the scales. Suspicion is much more top of mind than any sense of discovery. (And it’s not a coincidence that this is the first week without segments from the book, “The Perfect Stranger,” to influence our assessment of Catherine and the others.)
Catherine
Take the opening scene, when Catherine arrives at her mother’s house. She’s not, of course, traveling abroad on a new assignment — as Robert told their son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), to get her out of their immaculate estate — and with nowhere else to turn, she aims to rest and regroup at her modest childhood home. “You think that if you’re able to sleep, you might be able to think more clearly,” the narrator (Indira Varma) says. “Maybe start making sense of what’s happening to your life.” But instead of merely getting a good night’s rest, Catherine looks at her mother lying next to her. She sees her as the human beings he is; as Helen, rather than “the woman who has always been mum.” In that moment of clarity, Catherine finds clarity of her own by finally saying what happened to her — “everything you have not been able to tell Robert” — and afterward, she not only recognizes her situation more clearly, but she also recognizes how her choices have “caused so much pain” to others, not just herself.
This, in a nutshell, is the confession we’ve been waiting for. The audience needs to hear from Catherine… except we don’t actually get to hear her out. Throughout “Disclaimer” thus far, other people have interrupted and diverted Catherine’s attempts to say her piece, but this time it’s the narrative itself that’s withholding vital information. Cuarón omits Catherine’s confession entirely (or whatever her story may be), skipping ahead to how she feels about having said it, without allowing us to process what it is she’s said.
On the one hand, Catherine admitting she’s caused others pain could indicate she’s as guilty as everyone assumes. But it’s also an acknowledgement that’s as plain as day, no matter her culpability. Stephen is hurting. Nancy was hurting. Their son, Jonathan, died. Catherine needed to realize an acknowledgement (as she thought when she first called Stephen about the book) wasn’t going to cut it. But now, excluding her actual statement feels like a heavy implication that whatever she’s going to share about Italy will alter or even subvert our understanding of the events in question.
Arriving this late in the series — only two episodes left! — Cuarón’s plainest manipulation may be forgivable, even fascinating, to anyone swept up in the mystery. But it’s no wonder certain critics and viewers — well-versed in unreliable narrators and how their dubious narratives are constructed — have expressed impatience, even outrage, with the way “Disclaimer” unfolds. I would argue the rapid deterioration of non-Catherine perspectives is pointedly designed to develop characters that trigger big emotional reactions, framing and reframing them, over and over, as we’re pulled into safe and dangerous points of view. Sometimes we’re pulled less gracefully than others, making the story a bit transparent at times and stubbornly opaque at others. But it’s almost always revealing — about the subjects and those watching them.
Anyone feeling overly exploited may be saying, “Enough magic tricks. Let’s get to the truth.” But Episode 5 refuses Instead of answering, it continues to twist the dials of trust, evoking extra vigilance for some characters while coaxing careful study of others. To those still caught up in Cuarón’s storm, let’s take a closer look.
Trust Level: 7/10
Stephen
Remember when we first met Mr. Stephen Brigstocke? He was sitting behind his teacher’s desk, staring blankly at a classroom full of children he detests. “Spoiled, entitled brats,” he called them, and it’s that same disregard for kids these days that carries over into his vile treatment of Nicholas in Episode 5. What begins as a rather comical endeavor for Stephen — an out-of-touch old man learning about “the Instagram” while referring to a handwritten glossary of terms in order to understand abbreviated responses from his prey — soon sours into a noxious, hateful attack. There’s nothing funny about it, and that’s very much the point.
After establishing a baseline relationship with Nicholas over “shared” social media interests, Stephen starts to lead the bored 24-year-old to a revolting revelation: that the book he read was about him and his mother; that his mother was more interested in fucking a teenager than protecting her own son; and, dropping the hammer as plainly as possible, that “your mummy never loved you.”
To be clear: Stephen’s behavior is monstrous. But Cuarón coaxes us into going along with it by asking us to chuckle at the bewildered old man trying to use the internet (even the ping of an IM as he walks down the street elicits a judgmental laugh), only to then posit us behind Nicholas’ horrified perspective as he’s forced to look at naked photos of his mother and wrestle with the idea that their already tenuous relationship is even worse than it seems. That all this takes place without any reenacted passages from “The Perfect Stranger” only emphasizes how crazed Stephen’s revenge plot has become. He even says as much — noting, after sending the pictures, that he feels like he’s wrapped a kitten in a bag and dropped him into a river — and that’s without knowing that Nicholas has a dangerous reliance on drugs.
Is Stephen still acting on his late wife’s wishes? Is he even still acting on his own? Or has he gotten carried away, projecting a life’s worth of his own anguish and frustration onto targets he has to keep at a distance in order to continue his attacks? He met Nicholas once, but only carried out his plan from behind a computer screen. He won’t see Catherine at all. He is alone, and alone, he is dangerous. Even to himself.
Trust Level: 2/10
Robert
Let’s not even bother with Robert this week. The dude sucks, and Cuarón isn’t even trying to hide it. Just look at his first piece of narration this week: “Robert is jealous of the dead young man who had an affair with his wife and saved his child.” Damn. I’d say that’s cold, but it still doesn’t live down to how Robert has iced out his own wife.
(That being said, it is fitting how Stephen and Robert team-up at the end of the episode, given the former’s cutting heel turn this week and the latter’s long-established cruelty.)
Trust Level: 0/10
Nicholas
Instead of considering Robert, let’s spend a little time with Episode 5’s new perspective: Nicholas. As the camera leaves a father in the kitchen doing dishes, it finds his son, sitting upstairs, watching. Nicholas knows he should be helping, but he doesn’t, because “he doesn’t want to” — a selfish urge that seems to motivate most of his life’s choices. The third-person narration (same as Robert) then tells us Nicholas is aware of a rift between his parents, and he’s even sensitive enough to feel sympathy for the way his mother is being treated.
But, similar to the dishes, that’s about as far as his empathy extends: recognizing another person’s plight without caring enough to lend a hand. When Catherine calls him later, he puts her on hold for an agonizing 30 seconds so he can like a meme on Instagram. He rushes her off the phone because he’s “busy” rummaging through her refrigerator for booze and snacks. He also, it turns out, has a rather serious drug problem, smoking weed far too often but, of greater concern, retiring to a heroin den to get high until he can’t move. That’s where he feels he belongs, and that’s where we leave him after Stephen’s odious social media assault.
Nicholas isn’t easy to like. He’s clearly coasting on his father’s generous financial and emotional support. He doesn’t appear to have any productive ambitions, and he’s extremely rude to everyone he meets. (Even at work, he’s far too quick to dismiss and talk down to, as far as he knows, an old man shopping for a vacuum.) But Nicholas is also depressed and, as Stephen says, pretty “thick.” He doesn’t deserve what happens to him this week and, after being told the book he’s read is based on his own life, he imagines a “different story for his mother. That of a tragic heroine who lost her only child at sea. She would’ve fully recovered from that loss [… and] it’s better than being the mother of an under-achieving worthless shit.”
But now the question becomes: Is that still Catherine’s destiny? Nicholas may not be at risk of literally drowning at the moment, but he’s still adrift, Stephen just gave him a firm shove away from shore, and neither of his parents appears capable of saving him. Robert is too wrapped up in self-pity and bitterness. Catherine has long been kept at arm’s length, and it’s unclear how she’ll recover from her son’s latest ugly assumptions about her.
One child already died in this story. We know that. But amid all the adult’s drama tied to the past, Episode 5 shifts concern to the present and asks, “Are we at risk of losing one more?”
Grade: B+
“Disclaimer” is available on Apple TV+. Episode 6 will be released Friday, November 1, before the finale on November 8.
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