The Curse Review: A Surreal, Razor-Sharp Critique of White Privilege

Throughout his television career, Nathan Fielder has built two separate but overlapping images of himself. The first, his on-screen persona, is that of a stone-faced comedian who constantly places himself and others in uncomfortable situations, flubbing something as basic as a high-five or a polite joke, sometimes chastising a subject over a minor misstep. The second, as a philosopher of modern life, is that of a reality TV genius who uses the medium to comment on the nature of media consumption, what it means to “represent reality” in such shows, and the ethics of putting real people and their troubles in front of an audience.

The experimental HBO series The Rehearsal provided plenty of fuel for debates about whether or not Fielder was exploiting his subjects, regardless of their TV-ready antics and their signing release forms. Of course, such debates were at the heart of the series itself, as Fielder eventually highlighted the impossibility of making a reality show without exploitation, but he could be having his cake and eating it too by continuing to deal with these subjects.

Co-created by Fielder and Ben Safdie, The Curse hinges on Fielder’s awkwardness and asks us to get philosophical, only now Fielder is working within the bounds of an unambiguously scripted series. While this may seemingly eschew conversations about exploitation, all of Fielder’s concerns are still filtered through a fake reality show, Fliplanthropy, whose stars wish to make quality reality television while, at every step of production, doing the right thing.

Asher (Fielder) and Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone) are a married couple who’ve planted themselves in the small New Mexican town of Española. They’ve opened up two small businesses downtown, but they plan to do a lot more for the community if Fliplanthropy is greenlit by HGTV. Whitney, though, is very concerned about the “flip” in their show’s title, as she knows how unethical “flipping” houses for a profit can be, and she’s doubly concerned because it doesn’t represent what she and Asher actually do: sell eco-friendly “passive” homes that save on energy through temperature-controlling insulation.

But Whitney’s concerns don’t stop there, as she integrates herself into every injustice happening on set and throughout Española, with a supportive Asher almost always by her side. And as they set out to transform their surroundings, they try to convince others, as well as themselves, that they’re nothing like Whitney’s infamous slumlord millionaire parents (Corbin Bernsen and Constance Shulman), who’ve kept the city’s low-income housing nearly uninhabitable.

Meanwhile, Fliplanthropy’s saavy producer, Dougie (Safdie), begins to notice that Asher and Whitney’s marriage is faltering and plans to incorporate this tension into an otherwise dull show about do-gooders. The Curse thus follows this trio as they try to carefully control the optics of Asher and Whitney’s relationship to a community whose members, many of them Native American, Black, and Latino, almost always aren’t on their same wavelength.

Though Fielder still plays a version of the socially challenged straight man that he’s perfected over the years, The Curse’s nerve-wracking atmosphere recalls that of the Safdie brothers’ films, namely Good Time and Uncut Gems. The ultra-widescreen cinematography often frames Asher and Whitney behind reflective glass, with out-of-focus props taking up the edges, such that every shot feels like the viewer is peeking behind objects or windows.

Small moments of intimacy between Asher and Whitney start to feel questionable as the camera zooms in on them, suggesting a paranoid’s gaze, or the analog synth arpeggios familiar from the Safdie brothers’ films begin to kick in. The Curse’s score is courtesy of the Safdies’ frequent collaborator Daniel Lopatin, a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never, and avant-garde jazz keyboardist John Medeski, and it’s a tapestry of uncomfortable flourishes, some of them distortions of music generated by A.I. The sonic landscape of the series, which grows weirder as Asher and Whitney increasingly succumb to the belief that they were cursed by a little Black girl during the filming of B-roll footage for Fliplanthropy, makes it feel like anything and everything can go wrong.

Ultimately, The Curse is an incisive, razor-sharp critique of white privilege. Tossed-off jokes, like a moment in which Asher says “homeless” only to quickly correct himself and say “unhoused,” clue us in to Asher and Whitney’s hyper-awareness of political correctness and thorny issues of cultural appropriation, classism, and social media. (They own a jean store, and they don’t call the police on shoplifters for fear of their image being tarnished.) Whitney, more than Asher, is fascinatingly aware of the differences between genuine and performative activism, yet we quickly understand that she’s performing that know-how, and the more she becomes convinced that she’s cursed, we see how everything she does is inspired by guilt, paranoia, and the panopticon of media surveillance that she, admittedly, completely opted into.

The Curse is tightrope tense, using its often surreal and cringe-inducing scenarios to ask those who think themselves to be good liberals whether or not they should dismiss “crime” as a conservative bugbear when the dispossessed are the most affected by it, and for that it may be seen as a series with a political agenda. But its best moments should simply be viewed as a continuation of Fielder’s meditation on reality TV. No moral act in The Curse is “genuine” or “artificial” since our media-infected world blurred those lines decades ago, and the protagonists here know that. There’s only one thing that matters: who gets final cut.