The Curse (2024)
Dramedy series starring comedian Nathan Fielder and Oscar nominee Emma Stone about a pair of extremely unlikable yuppies filming a reality show about environmentally friendly housing in a run down New Mexico neighbourhood. Created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, one half of the pair of brothers that directed Uncut Gems.
The Curse is a show that's about half one of the most pointed pieces of satire on Biden era America anyone could make while it's still going on and about half someone else's injoke. See, even at its best, The Curse is a hard sell. It follows a married couple who are both individually comically toxic people trying, and consistently failing to, manage a television project, a philanthropic enterprise and their own unsalvageable marriage, using this premise to showcase some absolutely painful interactions between representations of the wealthy white upper middle class at its very worst and the workers, minorities and indigenous people who have to put up with their bullshit.
So it's a show about class and race and relationship dynamics and colonial heritage and environmentalism and gentrification and so many other mercilessly contemporary issues shown through the lense of a pair of characters whose inability to change, grow or reflect is their entire point. Nathan Fielder's Asher is spineless, passive-aggressive, co-dependent and socially inept. Emma Stone's Whitney is narcissistic, manipulative, sanctimonious and vindictive. What they share is their hypocrisy and their need for each other to affirm their value.
They live and sell their dreadful sustainable homes (tasteless monstrosities with reflective outer walls) tormenting their neighbourhood, their crew and each other, too self absorbed to learn anything from it. Much like in Uncut Gems, the direction does a fantastic job capturing tense social situations. Nathan Fielder does an impressive job playing a character who is genuinely a black hole of charm and charisma while Emma Stone does a pitch perfect job portraying the kind of person who seems pleasant and approachable for exactly as long as you don't get to know them better.
They are, very deliberately, characters without arcs (any lessons or experiences just sort of dissolve in a pool of oblivious self righteousness) and likewise, The Curse is a show without plot, as such. Things happen, but almost nothing exactly pays off or develops. For a while you might be fooled into thinking it's all building up to everything just collapsing around Whitney and Asher and it never quite does.
So, now you might be wondering what it all culminates in. And this is where The Curse takes kind of a left turn. Without wanting to give anything away, the show had some ambiguously magical realist elements throughout its entire run. The finale is where something unambiguously absurd and unexplainable happens that can only really be described as a non sequitur. Something that seems more like it should be an episode of Tim and Eric's Bedtime Stories than a continuation of anything that came before.
There is this old truism that states that "there is a thin line between clever and stupid" and while I'm a guy who can respect some big swings I'm gonna be honest, The finale of The Curse landed firmly on the wrong side of that line for me. I usually embrace absurdity but sometimes something is just silly. I'm sure what happened is a metaphor for... something but I'm sorry, it wasn't thought provoking or funny enough to justify itself.
The Curse is a compelling, if hard to watch, show that ends on a gimmicky non sequitur that doesn't exactly make the rest of series worse, but also feels like a punchline to a joke that was either not set up at all or that I must have somehow missed. Maybe it went over my head, but I legitimately have no idea what the intention there was. And I feel that if I found out I'd probably be underwhelmed. But, like, most of what's leading up to that is pretty good.
