It makes sense that Apple TV+ is releasing the first two episodes of Disclaimer simultaneously. The series premiere scratches the surface of Catherine’s lurid, long-buried secret, and the second episode hints at the scope of her downfall. It isn’t hard work for Stephen to turn Robert against the wife he has always adored — the old man has some damning receipts — but maybe that’s the point. How easy is it to ruin a marriage? A family? A life? Stephen may have a flip-book of naughty photos, but his real weapon is his will to destroy. With every domino that falls — every grenade he gleefully tosses in the direction of Catherine’s exquisitely manicured existence — Stephen falls a little more in love with the power he wields.
Episode two picks up precisely where the series premiere leaves off (perhaps this is a hint that the episodes are best understood as a set). Young Catherine is in silhouette against the sea, toying with her hair. She notices Jonathan taking her picture and confronts him playfully, though he doesn’t realize she’s being playful. Provocative. Five seconds ago, he was cheeky, confident, and a little pervy; now, he’s trembling, unable to maintain eye contact. Get it together, mate. He seems genuinely unwell, so unwell that it’s hard to imagine he’ll end up in bed with this woman at all.
Unless … Catherine must be reveling in how effortless it is, how powerful this boy makes her feel. Whatever difficulties life holds, there’s this to console her: She can make a man shudder. The dialogue between them is clunky. She corrects Jonathan for calling the sea the “ocean,†flirting pedantically, I guess. They both say “aura†a lot until 4-year-old Nick gives Jonathan an opportunity to play the hero. He helps this woman and her son up the beach with their things. If your husband is an Über-wealthy wife guy, does it matter that he’s not around when you need him for manual labor?
Twenty years later, in the present, Catherine wakes up from a bad night’s sleep in her new house with fresh resolve: protect the family. That will be her modus operandi from this point forward. Step one: shore up her relationship with Robert by cooking him a supper of sole meunière — a meal that makes him think of Paris, of her, of simpler times.
Step two: identify the author of The Perfect Stranger. For this, Catherine heads into the office. In voice-over, she self-flagellates for failing to research this matter as rigorously as she would a work subject. Then she takes out a notebook and makes a list entitled “Who knows?†Police. Waiter. Father. Mother. She draws a circle around Mother and Father to indicate they’re both dead. I guess even award-winning documentarians have to start somewhere, but I took more meaningful notes as a kid watching Ghostwriter.
So let’s start with Jonathan’s mother, Nancy Brigstocke (Lesley Manville). Because director Alfonso Cuarón has no respect for time’s relentless march forward, he introduces a flashback within the present-day story line that falls halfway between Jonathan’s sun-kissed Italian holiday and Stephen’s gray attempt to get his groove back. It turns out Catherine and Nancy once met, briefly, at a London café. Already dying of cancer, Nancy reached out posing as a widow. Maybe she wanted to seem as vulnerable and pitiable as possible, or maybe that’s just how she saw herself from the moment she barred Stephen from their dead son’s bedroom.
By this time, Nancy has seen Jonathan’s photos because she wants to know why this woman, who can’t stop playing with her yellow hair, lied to the police when she said she didn’t know him. Nancy wants Catherine to come clean, though it’s hard to see how that would help anyone now. Still, I don’t blame her. When you can’t have what you really want, you convince yourself to want other things instead. Rather than getting her son back, Nancy wants this perfect stranger’s confession. Instead of that, a consolation prize: Nancy asks to see Nicholas.
The bombshell of what happened on the beach is only hinted at, but it seems Jonathan died saving Nicholas. Does Nicholas remember? How much has Catherine kept secret from Robert? The affair, of course, but the whole ordeal? The beach, the police, their son nearly lost at sea? The waiter (whoever he is)? How many times did Catherine have to remind little Nicky not to tell Daddy? Not to mention the brave boy who carried their things and rescued him from the surf.
“He saved your son,†Nancy pleads. A son for a son, a mother to a mother. And then Saint Catherine lets it slip, almost accidentally: “Well, I wish he hadn’t.†Nicholas would have been about 14 years old when Catherine says that. Was he already a disappointment to his mother? Or was it motherhood in general she would have preferred to escape?
To demonstrate how close Catherine’s and Stephen’s timelines are to converging, we see the ever-grieving, definitely alive father head to the John Lewis department store to pass Nick a published copy of The Perfect Stranger. Stephen poses as a bumbling old widower in need of a lightweight vacuum. One gets the sense that Stephen thinks he has put on an extravagant disguise, but isn’t “bumbling old widower in need of a lightweight vacuum†exactly who Stephen is? He eventually bails on purchasing the Dyson but leaves the novel on the counter for Nick to find. As he exits the department store, Stephen mimes a grenade toss, an evil genius, if only in his own mind.
Later, Stephen makes a duplicate set of his son’s dirty photos, which he hand-delivers to Robert’s glass-walled offices, with St. Paul’s looming in the distance. Robert’s real job is inherited wealth, but his day job is to run an umbrella company that manages the vanity NGOs his siblings and cousins have set up to launder their reputations and their money. The business is called Hope, and he’s sitting in Hope as he flips through the photos of his wife on display for another man. He trembles with anger to look at them, just as Jonathan trembled with nerves to look at Catherine in the sunlight.
Robert recognizes the hotel in the photos but not the woman in them — not really. His Catherine was never like this: free, seductive, burning. His Catherine knows the fishmonger by name and visits her mother, who is suffering from the early symptoms of dementia, every week. His Catherine is at home right now whipping up sole meunière. His Catherine is always putting off sex, not staring down the lens of it.
Suddenly, Robert’s timeline jumps past Catherine’s. (Did he borrow Hermione’s Time-Turner?) In this (new?) timeline, Robert has already blown off his date with Catherine and lost his taste for her cooking and her secret-keeping. Instead, he picks up Nick from his squalid flat and takes him to the pub, where he’ll pump his son for information. Nicholas doesn’t remember the trip to Italy, he insists, the one Robert left early. Robert’s iPhone wallpaper is a photo of his family from when Nick was a baby, his family in another time. In a sense, not this family at all.
Robert wants to confront his wife about her infidelity in a composed manner that befits the man he believes he is, but the shouting starts almost as soon as he gets home. He hands Catherine the packet of photos; she can’t bear to look at them. “These could soon be all over the internet,†he barks at her. Robert’s right, I suppose, but that doesn’t seem like something Stephen would do. Stephen is dismantling Catherine’s world intimately, person by person, blowing it up one relationship at a time. He likes setting himself little tasks. Head to Snappy Snaps; bypass the security at Robert’s office building. Stephen, if we’re being real, could have done all of this more efficiently over email.
For her part, Catherine appears to have spent zero time imagining this confrontation with her husband or preparing what she would say, which is frankly confounding. Did she really think she could cry to Robert about The Perfect Stranger and he would never find out what the book is about? That this was all over for her already and rather painlessly, at that? “I’m so sorry,†she says. Robert bought her the red panties she put on for Jonathan, which is exactly the kind of detail a man would fixate on. Catherine decided to go back to work when they got home from that trip. Now, Robert believes it was all connected: a fundamental boredom with being his wife.
The affair dovetails so nicely with Robert’s paranoias. He has long worried that he wasn’t sexually experienced enough for Catherine when they got together. In this new house that isn’t yet their home, they fight about it. They yell. Robert’s not above a bitchy little potshot: “I should have listened to my family. They fucking warned me about you!†Catherine reminds Robert that she asked him not to leave her in Italy; it doesn’t excuse the affair, but it was still a fucked-up thing to do. Robert searches for more details to feed his anger. Did the affair continue? No. He died. Did our son hear you together? “No wonder he can’t even look at you.†In the end, Robert drives off, leaving Catherine alone and crying in the street. If you live in Notting Hill, though, is it even that bad to be barefoot in the middle of the road, the neighbors rushing to their windows?
It’s hard to predict where the show will travel from here. Two episodes have covered only two or three days. Timelines that appeared distinct have collided. Narrators that seemed close have proved omniscient: Catherine spilling what’s inside Robert’s head and what’s inside her son’s flat, where she’s surely never invited. A camera clicks on a sunny day and 20 years later and a thousand miles away a marriage is obliterated. Cats, always sinister, appear and reappear. So does the toy plane Nick saved from Catherine’s clear-out of the new house in episode one. Now, it hangs in Nick’s dingy room, and it’s hard to imagine Disclaimer won’t at some point explain to us its provenance.
This is the cinematic promise Cuarón brings to Disclaimer, which eats its own bread crumbs before they can lead us too far down any single path. There’s no mystery to solve here. We know who wrote the book; we know who published it. Beware of narrative and form, we’re told, but Disclaimer doesn’t commit to any one narrative or form. The series habitually outruns its own story, an ouroboros that moves forward only to find itself back on the beach in Italy.