‘The Curse’ has plenty of skin-crawling appeal
The skin-crawling appeal of “The Curse” is in the way it makes you want to get up from your couch, unzip yourself from your human suit and run your skeleton bones out into the woods where you can be buried and disassociate from civilization for the rest of time.
It’s not often that a piece of filmed entertainment has that kind of effect, which is like weaponized, military grade cringe. (The first three chapters of the 10-episode series were screened for the purposes of this review.) But creators Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie zero in on a winning (losing) formula, centering on a couple filming a reality show for a home improvement network, and passing their seismic lack of self-awareness and the ripple effect it creates on to the viewer.
The couple is Fielder and no less than Academy Award-winner Emma Stone, who play Asher and Whitney Siegel, a married couple pitching a show to HGTV about their supposedly philanthropic efforts to rehabilitate a New Mexico community, through gaudy “sustainable” homes built out of boxy, mirrored exteriors. They’re not outright villains, they just go about everything the complete and total wrong way, their drive-by attempts at do-gooding reeking of white saviorism.
Fielder is the mischievous provocateur who has made awkwardness his stock-intrade; his 2022 HBO series “The Rehearsal” was such an odd study of human behavior that it read like a training video for aliens trying to assimilate with our species. He and Safdie — one-half of the Safdie brothers duo, who specialize in hyper-charged experiments in anxiety (see “Good
Time,” “Uncut Gems”) — make for an unholy combo if the goal is passive, relaxing viewing.
Safdie co-stars as Dougie Schecter, Asher and Whitney’s producer, and the amount of rings he wears on his fingers is its own running joke. Things quickly begin to fall apart on production of the show, which may or may not be related to a “curse” put on Asher after he offers $100 to a young girl (Dahabo Ahmed) selling drinks in a parking lot while on camera, and immediately takes the money back after cameras stop rolling. “Captain Phillips” Academy Award-nominee Barkhad Abdi plays the young girl’s father.
Can things get worse? Do you really have to ask? The show’s takes on reality TV, social media, cultural appropriation, racism, marriage, relationships and the peculiarities of modern living is like a mirror reflecting back at viewers, just like the surface of one of Asher and Whitney’s homes. The twisted, distorted, decadent fun of “The Curse” is how much you’ll recognize but won’t like what you see.
Much of ‘The Curse’ plays as a wacko takedown of HGTV programming and its reality TV brethren, deriding the genre as a playground for manipulative two-faced narcissists who so vigorously play fictional roles on- and off-camera that the line between what’s genuine and what’s make-believe ceases to exist.