I cannot describe to you what "The Curse" is about. Neither can any critic, either because the show is just so surreal and indescribable, or because they don't want to out of fear of ruining the surprises. All I know, from what I've read, is that this is yet another dry, deadpan Nathan Fielder show where you get nervous watching it and laugh out of desperation. Which is exactly what he wants.
"The Curse" is a show about a fake HGTV show, and stars Nathan Fielder, Emma Stone, Benny Safdie, Corbin Bernsen, Constance Shulman and Gary Farmer. It premieres on Showtime tomorrow, November 10, 2023. Here is what all the critics are raving about.
The premise
Married couple Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher Seigel (Nathan Fielder) have struck a deal with HGTV to produce the pilot of their new eco-driven home flipping show, titled Flipanthropy. Set in what Whitney refers to as her hometown (it's not) of Española, New Mexico, the show aims to follow Whitney and Asher as they flip rustic homes into what they call "Passive Houses," which are carbon neutral, 100 percent sustainable homes that function as their own regenerative ecosystem.
Emma Stone, welcome back to TV
Emma Stone's return to television in Showtime's "The Curse" showcases her eagerness to challenge herself and explore her capabilities in unique and thought-provoking roles.
Whitney is the embodiment of liberal allyship run amok, her performative do-gooder behavior delivered with an earnestness that can't mask the fact that everything she does is really about making herself feel and look good. She needs to, as it turns out, since she's the offspring of parents (Corbin Bernsen and Constance Shulman) who have been tarred and feathered in the press for being "slumlords." Whitney cares most about how she projects herself, whether she's embracing husband Asher's Judaism or offering a job to down-and-out local Fernando (Christopher D. Calderon) at the coffee shop — which is really just a glorified prop shop that Whitney and Asher are personally funding. In every way, Whitney is a phony who's so desperate to be loved and successful that she buys the very bullshit she's selling, including the lovey-dovey jokiness she shares with Asher, a partner whose main traits are wholesale awkwardness and staunch devotion to his spouse.
Emma Stone, who has already proven herself to be one of the best actors working today, brings a balance of comedic timing and deft dramatic balance to this natural and realistic performance. Both actors are far more grounded in their performances as compared to Benny Safdie, whose work has grown from his days directing Uncut Gems alongside his brother into one of the more intriguing acting filmographies in recent memory. Safdie plays Dougie as a broken man who wants fame and success at any cost and it is thanks to his actions that the events of "The Curse" take place.
This show is about... what?
There's plenty of material here for savage cultural satire, and Asher and Whitney make for easy targets with their tone-deaf gentrifying crusade and hipster sanctimony. We definitely get some satisfaction from seeing these pretentious millennials have their bubbles of privilege punctured, but other stabs at humor don't land as well, like outdated reality TV parodies and bizarrely lowbrow jokes about sexual dysfunction. Plus, the plots are too diffuse, getting bogged down by too many subplots and derailed by jarring WTF moments.
The show is a vicious condemnation of a certain kind of half-committed liberalism, and while it doesn't quite intend for a "South Park"-style "People on both sides are crazy, but let's focus on left-wing hypocrisy" commentary, there's a lot of that — especially in a mid-season episode in which a prominent Hollywood conservative guest stars and gets to teach our anti-heroes a valuable lesson about tolerance. "The Curse" uses its Latino, Indigenous and immigrant characters for contrasting authenticity, though I can't completely tell if it knows that this is a cliché of a different type or it's actively tweaking that cliché. Either way, it's a show that cuts close to the bone regarding people whose version of doing good and being tolerant is telling the world they're doing good and being tolerant.
"The Curse" is often beguiling, sharply acted and riveting in all its idiosyncratic execution — the way scenes linger for far longer than we've come to expect from contemporary television grammar. (On the technical side of things, John Medeski’s score is especially effective.) By other metrics, "The Curse" is awfully preening in its nihilism, perhaps overly assured of its knowing righteousness as it crashes through this fragile ecosystem. (And is, incidentally, crassly hung up on cheap jokes about masculinity.) Many of the threads introduced in the first third or so of the ten-episode season promise a grand convergence, a mighty reckoning. But as the series marches toward its end, we get the sad sense that maybe Fielder and Safdie don't have a cohesive idea of where it's all headed, how everything is interconnected.
This is the creepiest non-horror show ever made
Instead of trying to describe "The Curse," let me describe to you the feeling of watching "The Curse." For most of the 10-episode series, something feels slightly off. Perfectly mundane mishaps play as overwhelmingly ominous, while social hangups become the ticking time bombs by which relationships will shatter into a thousand bloody pieces. It was smart that Showtime's first teaser for "The Curse" was simply a scene of Whitney and Asher doing several takes of standup for their show, their faces frozen in TV-ready smiles for long enough that it starts to feel uncomfortable… and maybe even a little sinister. It's exactly this kind of scene, which dances on the razor's edge between comedy and horror, that embodies "The Curse's" uniquely unsettling tone.
Much of what allows "The Curse" to seem almost skin-crawling in its awkwardness and discomfort is thanks to incredible sound design and patient cinematography and editing. All of these are effectively hallmarks of a more modern style of psychodrama and thriller as evinced by the indie studio A24, so it should come as no surprise that the very same studio co-produced this show. (There's also the musical undercurrents lent by composer Daniel Lopatin, as the soundtrack seems to shriek even as the characters' voices stay low.) Though the episode lengths vary, many clock in around 50 to 60 minutes and are replete with long takes, slow camera pans, and a consistent sense that we're almost spying on the events of the show. Where the handful of show-within-a-show scenes are predictably polished, shiny, and fast-paced, the rest of "The Curse" is filmed in a beyond verite style, implying that the cameras filming the series are as hidden as possible to allow the potential dissolution of a shaky marriage to crumble without any true intrusion.
Behind the camera, Safdie's influence is palpable in the stark aesthetic of the show, which he and his and brother Josh honed in their anxiety-inducing filmography, from claustrophobic, verité-style cinematography to a ringing, buzzing score from avant-jazz composer John Medeski and producer Daniel Lopatin, a frequent Safdie collaborator also known as Oneohtrix Point Never. From a technical as well as a thematic standpoint, in its three complementary lead performances, and ultimately in one of the weirdest go-for-broke finales in the history of TV, "The Curse" is a brain-breaking revelation on par — and of a piece — with "The Rehearsal." Once again, it's Fielder, a man whose face seems frozen in a flinch at the constant awareness of his own existence in this humiliating world, who makes the experience so transcendently uncomfortable.
TL;DR
"The Curse" is the most exciting, innovative and delightfully uncomfortable series of the year.
It jack-knifes from awkward to tense to borderline horror to hysterical to surreal and it's one of the best shows I've seen this year.
"The Curse" is already one of the most richly imagined and acted shows of the year.
The show leaves too many of its ideas undeveloped, especially from its central themes about race and constructions of the self.
[Image: YouTube]
