The Curse Review: Fielder-Safdie-Stone Satire of White Guilt Is an Exercise in Emotional Masochism

When I saw the premiere of The Curse—the new Showtime series conceived by the attractive collaboration of Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie—at the New York Film Festival, I was left underwhelmed and slightly cold, if charmed by the notion of watching TV in the extravagant Alice Tully Hall. As admitted by festival director Dennis Lim when he introduced this screening of the first three episodes, it was an unorthodox move for the prestigious film festival to screen television. But it was Benny Safdie—if I recall correctly, this was nearly a month ago—who reached out to Lim personally to ask that he watch the show and see what he thinks. Lim thought highly of the series, but ultimately I spent a good chunk of the three hours of that daunting multi-episode screening thinking about how much I would have rather been doing another rewatch of Fielder’s Comedy Central breakout, Nathan For You.

It’s not that I thought The Curse was bad per se. But in the moment, I felt similarly about it as I did The Rehearsal, Fielder’s conceptual art installation-slash-reality show that provoked some of the most excruciating conversations surrounding ethics in art and comedy and reality TV last fall. I always felt that the lessened intentionality and artistry of Nathan For You regarding its interactions with non-actors and the trajectory of its episodes provoked far more interesting conversations about American culture and even reality TV ethics. Now, with Fielder finally trading documentary for narrative with The Curse, the depiction of Fielder and Emma Stone as a well-meaning, rich white couple trying to force their way into creating a sustainable town out of a poor community for HGTV felt somewhat contrived, easy, and grating. At least, at first.

In The Curse, Fielder has swapped his uncomfortable interactions with out-of-the-joke regulars in favor of uncomfortable interactions with fictional characters that all still manage to be about the television genre Fielder is most at home in. In The Curse, Fielder plays Asher Siegel, husband to Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone)—the daughter of wealthy “slum lords,” owners of a notorious low-income housing establishment that is ruthless with evictions. Attempting to shed the reputation built for her by these familial associations, Whitney sets out to improve poor peoples’ live for realsies, by effectively becoming a gentrifier in denial while trying to sell it to HGTV as a house-flipping series. 

Whitney and Asher masquerade as well-rooted insiders-but-outsiders who “really care” about the local community and the environment. They combine both these passions by snatching up foreclosed homes and turning them into “Passive Homes”—entirely self-sustaining, environmentally friendly houses which blatantly ape the architectural aesthetics of real-life artist Doug Aitken’s famous Reflective House. The couple doesn’t consider what they do to be gentrification, though, but rather “conscientiously rejuvenating distressed homes to overall benefit the community,” then using a portion of home sales to subsidize local rent. It might sound good on paper, and maybe someone with better intentions could accomplish it. But all the Siegels have is $1 million in loans from Whitney’s parents and a limitless greed for positive visibility.

The Passive Home has its structural problems, less sustainable for human life than Asher and Whitney would care to admit. But there is nothing sustainable about the presence of the Siegels in the New Mexico town of Española, and even less viable is their marriage with one another. Whitney is ambitious and confident but so desperate to be liked that it literally reeks off the screen like a noxious gas. Stone plays her with an overwhelming superficiality that I at first mistook for overwrought acting before I realized it just annoyed and horrified me in all the right ways. Whitney is so sickeningly willing to refine her desires and personality to fit whatever she needs in the moment, no clearer than when she interacts with the minorities who she is frantic to prove her respect for, particularly the local Pueblo Tribe members. She is white guilt personified and metastasized, but it’s also unclear who she is, or ever was, underneath it.

Asher, meanwhile, is the Nathan Persona on steroids. Finally given a real environment to act outside of the painfully awkward and self-effacing, half-real character he cultivated through the shows that made him famous, Fielder doesn’t abandon that persona entirely but stretches it, augments it. Asher is largely soft-spoken, very meek and subordinate to his wife (no more apparent than in a riotously perverse example of their sex life in Episode 1), partly due to his struggles with having—yes—a tiny penis, which—yes—does hang dong. But Asher is also conniving, cowardly, and capable of expressing emotions that, before The Curse, I was doubtful Nathan Fielder could emote. And Asher is just as self-serving as his wife, if not more-so for how discreetly malignant it is. It would make them an ostensibly perfect fit: two people who are rotten to the core but so anxious to be seen as good so as to fix everything that’s broken in themselves and their relationship. But their inherent compatibility is only a mutually assured destruction.

The series slowly chronicles the couples’ worsening undoing in the aftermath of a curse placed upon Asher by a young girl selling sodas in a parking lot. Instructed by their shaggy cameraman Dougie (Benny Safdie’s greatest acting role yet) to do an act of good for the camera, Asher appears to promise Nala (Hikmah Warsame) the only bill in his wallet: $100. But he swiftly takes it back once they’ve gotten the shot so that he can exchange it for a more reasonable $20. Despite what he feels is still a generous offer, Nala curses him—a harmless TikTok trend which thus consumes Asher’s life after it’s revealed to have come to fruition. But instead of overwhelming the show with fantastical elements as I thought it would, the titular curse merely hangs eerily in the periphery while the show meanders through its various, otherwise unexciting conflicts.

What’s so creepy about The Curse, is its lack of focus on the curse itself. The curse and the mental turmoil it causes Asher are always there (manifesting amusingly), but it’s unobtrusive to the majority of the action and dramatic beats in the show. The series is more unsettling for how it handles the apparent mundanity of its narrative threads and the atmosphere it creates, through Lopatin’s tinkling, uneasy score, dropping a single, horrific piano key to induce nauseating apprehension, and cinematographer Maceo Bishop’s watchful camera, which prides itself on holding shots like an inhaled breath waiting frantically to release. The only outwardly odd thing about The Curse is this curse, whatever it may be, whether or not it’s real or even just a placebo effect born of Asher’s mind. Yet it’s nevertheless a force that manipulates and magnifies everything in its affected scope. 

Despite Lim’s insistence before the NYFF premiere that The Curse is as cinematic as any film and deserved to be seen on the biggest screen possible (a sentiment which will be furthered by the ensuing Film at Lincoln Center screenings of the series), I found that the show played far better alone in my humble bedroom. With no more guffawing laughter from a large audience over jokes that are no more than chuckle-worthy, the creeping, slowly suffocating unease that The Curse excels at, building with unnerving momentum as the series progresses, felt far more hypnotizing in the quiet solitude of my home. Sometimes, TV really is just TV, and deserves to be TV, and is good just as TV—even if you have creatives behind its conception like the Safdie brothers (Josh served as an executive producer) and Nathan Fielder, A-lister star power like Emma Stone, and an evocative score composed by John Medeski and produced by Daniel Lopatin, the man who helped to give people panic attacks by scoring Good Time and Uncut Gems.

There is plenty of humor in the series, but it’s not the laugh-a-minute type of cringe many may remember from Nathan For You, and it’s also not quite the more meditative, almost melancholy atmosphere of The Rehearsal. The humor and atmosphere of the The Curse can only be described as evil. I found the occasional laughs I did or didn’t get from the show fairly irrelevant to its quality, which is more reliant on the positively bizarre environment it cultivates, lives in, and exacerbates from episode to episode. It’s redundant and trite at this point to assert comparisons to the work of David Lynch, but I was struck by something familiar in the way that the The Curse hyper-focuses on the seemingly ordinary and turns it into pure evil, as if the rotted consciouses of its protagonists are infecting not only their surroundings but the soul of the show and the way we, the audience, perceive it. 

It’s a revolting and delicious type of discomfort, both expressed in the stomach-turning interactions between characters and the intentional artistry of the filmmaking, which maintains a rosy, washed-out lighting scheme that is directly antithetical to the actions of its subjects. It’s often no better articulated than when Asher or Whitney are doing their darndest to insist that they’re good people and be as pathetically deferential to minorities as possible. In private, they manufacture every aspect of their lives, take money from their corrupt family, and peddle an altruism that’s just opportunism in disguise—what’s worse, they really believe in it. It’s the same sort of economic opportunism that results in startups like Uber and Airbnb and even Netflix to fill a void that’s ultimately too good to be true. From the nature of their HGTV show—first titled “Fliplanthropy” then “Green Queen”—to their deceptive storefronts meant to provide jobs for locals like “Barrier Coffee” (I wonder what that’s a satire of), The Curse partly satirizes the promise of improvement in our current age: well-meaning trust fund kids who only want to disrupt the world rather than fix it.

As a disclaimer, this review technically only covers the first nine episodes of the series, with the finale kept under tight embargo until January. It’s somewhat difficult to talk about the show in full without including the climactic episode, but there’s a lot throughout the series that I didn’t even get to in my review; I could probably write multiple paragraphs about Benny Safdie as Dougie, who is easily the funniest character in the show, and also the most tragic.

It’s a disservice to The Curse to go into it thinking it’s just another funny Nathan Fielder venture, but it’s also unfair to go into it, like I basically did, anticipating Nathan Fielder’s Big Serious Adult Dramatic A24 Show. Once I exchanged the grand Alice Tully theater for my bed and 24-inch Roku television, my initial expectations and feelings on the show changed quite drastically. I found that the agonizing cringe and progressively disquieting nature of the series was really meant to be felt in full force alone in the safety of one’s home. When you’re at your most vulnerable, something about The Curse silently sneaks up on you; like the perniciousness of societal decay under the guise of progress.

The Curse premieres November 10th on Showtime. 

Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared at Gawker, The Playlist, Polygon, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more. You can follow her on Twitter.

For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV.