(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
Before Apple TV+ launched in 2019, there were rumblings that it would be star-studded but with a chaste network TV approach to sex scenes. While the streamer doesn’t rival the nudity of premium cable like HBO, Showtime, and Starz, Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer boasts Oscar-winning actors and leaves very little to the imagination in its third episode.
Disclaimer pushes the sexuality further, but this is actually the second recent Apple TV+ thriller to titillate viewers, joining Presumed Innocent’s dedication to showing off Jake Gyllenhaal’s pert behind. Sex is intrinsic to that courtroom drama narrative. Disclaimer follows suit, swapping murder for a murky version of the past and plenty of steamy scenes within its non-linear narrative. There is a “sexual content” trigger warning at the start of this week’s Disclaimer episode.
Jonathan Brigstocke (Louis Partridge) is frozen in time. The 19-year-old died in a tragic drowning accident while traveling in Italy, but not before he embarked on a salacious affair with a married woman as her young son slept in the adjoining room. Or so we are led to believe by everyone other than celebrated documentarian Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett). Unfortunately, a series of Playboy-esque photographs support the infidelity accusation.
Jonathan’s father, Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), uses the explicit pics of young Catherine (Leila George) and the manuscript written by his now-deceased wife Nancy (Lesley Manville) against the wealthy woman, who seemingly drew Jonathan into her bedroom 20 years ago—and, in a roundabout fashion, to his death.
Archetypes are deployed throughout the first three episodes, which feels purposeful rather than lazy storytelling. The MILF and eager-to-learn teen provide the hot and heavy connection that leads to the streamer’s most sexually graphic scenes to date, taking us on a journey of orgasmic discovery with a very willing student ready to be directed toward bliss. It isn’t quite a Mrs. Robinson scenario, but the age and experience gap is fundamental to the dynamic. Famously, sex scenes and age gaps are topics no one has opinions about ever…
Only kidding! Sex scenes and age gap discourse are two of the most played hits (or misses) on X, the site that used to be called Twitter, and Disclaimer is certainly not playing coy—at one point, Catherine’s arched naked body is shot like a continent to be explored. Subtle this show is not in how the camera’s soft-core gaze lingers on Catherine.
It is far from the first time Cuarón has depicted youthful exuberance, carnal desire, and a woman in her late twenties giving a guiding hand: a beach plays a role in Cuarón’s sexy 2001 breakout movie, Y tu mamá también. Some ingredients are the same, but the different perspectives make me think more about the Dominic West and Maura Tierney series The Affair. In fact, the graphic nature of the all-night f---fest is more in line with the approach to sex and nudity of Showtime (which The Affair aired on) than Apple TV+.
Based on the 2015 novel by Renee Knight, Catherine’s feckless husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) takes zero time to believe his wife had a “holiday shag” with a horny teenager. Aside from attempting to contact Robert to plead her case and leaving a voicemail for Stephen to acknowledge the “exquisite work of fiction” that is The Perfect Stranger, Blanchett is mostly absent from this episode—the past shifts to the foreground, crisscrossing between the before and after Jonathan’s accident.
Cuarón constantly moves between framing devices to destabilize, signaling that not everything presented is accurate. Whose version is the right one? Stephen narrates his storyline in the present and past, and Indira Varma offers an omniscient POV, moving between the second and third person in her observations. Another thread shows flashbacks to Jonathan’s European vacation, opening and closing with a stylized iris shot playing into a dreamy, hazy, erotic beach-read template—perhaps reflecting how Nancy depicts events in The Perfect Stranger.
When we see Catherine seductively teasing a bashful and bumbling Jonathan at the hotel bar—Partridge taking a page or two from the ‘90s Hugh Grant rom-com playbook—is Nancy filling in the gaps of her son’s last few days? Disclaimer is awash with unreliable narrators, and emotional beats move like the tide of the Mediterranean sea: the bar flirtation that quickly becomes a sweaty romp plays alongside gut-wrenching scenes of the Brigstockes dealing with the immediate grief and red tape of their young son dying abroad.
Scenes toggle between a seduction that will have Kylie Minogue wondering how her name gets mentioned as much as it does and Nancy’s raw, guttural howling when she identifies her only child. Chopping up material is purposely provocative and whiplash-inducing. While I bristle when filmmakers like Cuarón enter the TV realm and insist they made a “seven-hour movie” (yawn), this exploration of narrative authority is fascinating.
There is a dollop of looking-through-fingers second-hand embarrassment at what quantifies as sultry behavior regarding the central seduction. If the “What things would you do to Kylie?” scene didn’t already up the cringe levels, then the realization that Nancy might be bringing this fling to the page sets off an alarm of what is considered appropriate between a mother and son.
Even Nancy doesn’t paint her son as selfless; instead, she gives him an emotionally immature edit in temperament and relationships. Jonathan becomes the ripe young man lured by the bored housewife who is so horny she will bring a stranger back to her hotel room while her young son sleeps in the room next door. The latter makes the graphic nature of the sex scene and the swirling la la la sexy music even more jarring when Nicholas wakes up, and his mother shushes him back to bed so she can get her end away again.
Sex is the driver of the novel within Disclaimer, but so far, Catherine has zero agency in telling her story.
