Right from its first episode, Alfonso Cuarón's Disclaimer warned us to "beware of narrative and form." After all, the person telling a story and the way in which they choose to tell it can be just as manipulative or misleading as an outright lie. Now, in Disclaimer's finale, that driving question of narrative manipulation finally comes to a head.
Throughout Disclaimer's first six episodes, we've only heard one side of the story of Jonathan Brigstocke's (Louis Partridge) death, as laid out in a book by his mother Nancy (Lesley Manville). As Nancy writes in The Perfect Stranger, documentarian Catherine Ravenscroft (played in the present by Cate Blanchett, and in the past by Leila George) seduced Jonathan while on vacation in Italy with her young son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Nancy's evidence? Photos of Catherine in lingerie, then in the nude, that she found while developing film from Jonathan's camera.
According to The Perfect Stranger, Catherine convinced Jonathan to stay with her an extra day to extend their beachside affair. However, as the two rushed off to have sex, Nicholas went out into the sea on a small boat, unsupervised. Upon returning to the beach, Jonathan saved him, only to drown as lifeguards focused solely on saving Nicholas.
Nancy believes that Catherine made the monstrous choice not to call attention to Jonathan's struggles out at sea because he'd wanted to return to London with her, which would complicate matters with her husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen). She channeled that hatred of Catherine into writing The Perfect Stranger. Upon Nancy's death, her husband, Stephen (Kevin Kline), used that manuscript to steadily tear Catherine's life apart, all without having ever met her.
The two finally come face to face in Disclaimer's finale, and Catherine gets to share her side of the story. While she admits Nancy got some elements of the story right — details of the location, for example, and the fact that Catherine chose to stay silent about Jonathan's drowning — her telling is far from the lusty sexual escapades detailed in The Perfect Stranger. Instead, it's a graphic, devastating account of sexual assault, one that throws all of Disclaimer into a harsh new light. Let's break it down.
What really happened between Catherine and Jonathan in Disclaimer?
As Catherine tells Stephen in Disclaimer's finale, Jonathan broke into her hotel room and forced her at knifepoint to undress. Hoping to protect herself and Nicholas, she complied. He then made her pose for him as he took photos, and raped her throughout the night. Disclaimer shows the traumatic scene in detail, but without any diegetic sound. Instead, all we hear is Catherine's narration, retelling a story she's never told anyone else.
Her narration continues into the next day, when, hoping to maintain an air of normalcy for Nicholas, she took him to the beach. Exhausted and in pain from Jonathan's assault, she falls asleep, at which point Nicholas drifts off to sea. From here, the story plays out similarly to Nancy's conception of it: Jonathan rushes out to save Nicholas; lifeguards bring the boy safely back to shore; and Catherine says nothing about Jonathan. However, Catherine's motivation here is more complicated, as the young man who saved her son's life is her rapist.
With Jonathan dead, and with everyone believing him to be a hero, Catherine chose to get rid of any evidence she'd collected of the assault, including photos she took of her injuries. "I thought, 'Thank God he's dead. I don't have to prove myself innocent to anyone. I don't have to talk about it if I don't want to. I don't have to relive it if I don't want to,'" she tells Stephen.
Catherine also reveals she learned she was pregnant after the trip and, not knowing whether the father was Robert or Jonathan, terminated the pregnancy. With all physical traces of the assault gone, she hoped to continue her life as if nothing ever happened. But the arrival of The Perfect Stranger re-ignited that trauma, painting her as the villain when she was in fact a victim.
Disclaimer has been building to this reveal for a while.
I'm always conflicted when film and TV use sexual assault as a plot device. Too often, it can feel like hollow shock factor, brutalization for brutalization's sake. That Disclaimer positions Catherine's rape as a twist, especially after six episodes of what feels more like a pulpy thriller, threatens to push the show into shock-factor territory.
However, Disclaimer has been building to Catherine's story for its entire run, planting seeds of doubt in the viewers' minds even as Stephen, Robert, and Nicholas blindly believe the fantasy Nancy has presented. For example, we learn that the suggestive photos Jonathan took of Catherine on the beach were nonconsensual images of her brushing sand from her thighs and chest well before they met. We also learn that the small knife wound Nancy saw on Jonathan's arm at the morgue was self-inflicted as part of his attempts to scare Catherine. And we get a better understanding of why Jonathan's girlfriend, Sasha (Liv Hill), left him in Italy in the first place. It wasn't because her aunt died, as Nancy wrote in The Perfect Stranger. Instead, it's because of a fight the two had that led to her mother making what Nancy called some "extreme" accusations. While we never learn exactly what those are, there's a clear undertone of sexual violence to their parting — one that Stephen and especially Nancy conveniently ignore.
Then, of course, there's the fact that The Perfect Stranger is solely a product of Nancy's speculation, and we know that she has a very rosy outlook on who Jonathan was. (It's an outlook that Cuarón renders literal with the warm, summery glow of any scene lifted from The Perfect Stranger.) Her version of Jonathan is such a perfect, innocent angel that it's impossible to think of him as a real person — he's literally too good to be true.
Nancy's overprotectiveness of Jonathan's character in death means she offloads flaw after flaw onto her fictionalized version of Catherine, someone she's only seen in suggestive photos. Because of this, she leans hard into the misogynistic trope of the predatory older woman, painting Catherine as a demonic temptress. (Only one of these women has written Kylie Minogue-centric erotica about her son, though.)
Cuarón combats Nancy's characterization of Catherine as a temptress through elements beyond the narrative content of Catherine's encounter with Jonathan. For instance, the paintings on Catherine's hotel room ceiling shift depending on the account. In Nancy's imaginings of Catherine and Jonathan's passionate love affair, the ceiling depicts lovers entwined in a passionate embrace. When Catherine recalls her assault, she remembers the ceiling bearing the image of an ailing woman held up by angels, while the painting above her bed is a woman in a frightened state of undress.
Elsewhere, Catherine wears a red swimsuit the day of Jonathan's death in The Perfect Stranger — the same color she wore when they met. But in Catherine's memory, the swimsuit is black, reminiscent of mourning and the pain she suffered the night before. Of course, the small details in Catherine's telling may not all be objectively "true," as they are a memory. But they inform the tone of her recollection of a great trauma, and because of that, there's far more truth to them than Nancy's fiction — especially since Nancy's only "proof" was a set of photographs. And as Catherine tells Stephen, "photographs are not reality...They are a fragment of reality."
In the end, that's what Disclaimer comes down to: Do you choose to believe shocking fragments of a tale presented out of context? Or do you question them and seek the truth?
Stephen and Robert choose the former, with Stephen using the photos as part of his quest for vengeance, and Robert using them to further fuel his conception of himself as a victim at Catherine's hands. Neither stop to consider what Catherine might say, leading each to ask themselves the same thing about The Perfect Stranger in the finale: "Why did you not question it?" The simplest answer might just be that they never even considered the alternative, so caught up are they in the beleaguered heroism of their own stories.
And that brings us back to Catherine, whose own perspective throughout Disclaimer has been carefully guarded, characterized only by a scolding narrator (voiced by Indira Varma) who picks at her shame. Based on that narration, it could be easy to assume Catherine is guilty of everything Nancy accuses her of. Yet her abject horror at The Perfect Stranger, as well as the many holes in Nancy's story, are more than enough reason to start doubting the story we've been presented about Jonathan. With Catherine's revelation in Disclaimer's finale, the series confirms all these doubts. All along, we haven't been watching a woman hide from a heinous past crime. Instead, we've been watching Catherine as she's forced to re-live her trauma, something she never thought she'd have to do. It's nothing short of gutting, and less of a twist than a vital narrative re-contextualization.
Disclaimer is now streaming on AppleTV+.
If you have experienced sexual abuse, call the free, confidential National Sexual Assault hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), or access the 24-7 help online by visiting online.rainn.org.
