by Robert Bouffard, Editor
A white couple — Asher (Nathan Fielder) and Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone) — are shooting a reality home-buying show in Española, New Mexico in hopes of it being picked up by HGTV. While Española is heavily populated by Indigenous people, the Siegels insist that they aren’t gentrifiers, and that their main mission is to bring affordable, energy efficient housing to an area that they think could really use it. In reality, though, their motivations aren’t quite so noble.
Whitney’s parents are widely known to be slumlords in the surrounding areas, and because of that, Whitney is motivated to not be seen in the same way as them. She wants to come across as a better person in their show, Fliplanthropy, but whether she actually wants to be a better person is a whole different discussion entirely.
From the creative minds of Fielder and Benny Safdie, comes The Curse, which follows the Siegels and Dougie (Safdie), Fliplanthropy’s producer. Fielder, who is known for his work in the reality TV space, with Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, makes for an initially surprising, but ultimately natural, pairing with Safdie, who, until 2023, was most known for his work as half of the directing duo with his brother, Josh. Fielder’s shows can broadly be classified as comedies (definitely NFY more so) — broadly, because there’s a base level of discomfort that he brings as an awkward presence who pries at the people he interacts with. The Safdies’ movies, meanwhile, have always been characterized by Murphy’s law — whether it’s Good Time or Uncut Gems, whatever can go wrong, does go wrong for their protagonists, and it’s usually by their own making, thanks to bad decisions arising due to their self-destructive tendencies.
So in The Curse, the creative partnership of Fielder and Safdie produces a highly uncomfortable show about three people whose morals and motivations are questionable at best. When Asher goes up to buy a soda from a young girl on a hot day as a chance to get footage of him helping the community, he realizes all he has is a $100 bill. He gives it to her, makes sure they got the shot, and then attempts to take it back so he can go exchange it for a smaller bill. But the girl, Nala (Hikmah Warsame), isn’t so forgiving, and utters the words, “I curse you,” to Asher, which sends him on what ends up being a 10-episode spiral until the end of the season.
There are so many little details and plot threads within The Curse’s 10 episodes that it would be impossible to try to cover them all. So I’ll stick to some broad points. For one, both Fielder and Stone give astonishing performances. Fielder’s shows have always seen him at some level of performance, even though they fall under the banner of reality TV, but as he plays a fully fictional character who doesn’t go by “Nathan Fielder” in The Curse, it’s great to finally see him show off his chops. Asher is an (unsurprisingly) awkward person, and it’s never really clear what Whitney sees in him, and that comes through in the character and performance. Asher has what you could call a humiliation fetish, and there is obviously a lot in his past that he’s repressed, or which he is deliberately misremembering, because of this feeling of inferiority. It seems that Dougie, who’s supposedly his best friend, used to bully Asher when they were kids, though Asher remembers it as playful teasing. And amidst all this, Asher is prone to loud outbursts in moments of heightened anger. Fielder plays this all so well, and his performance would be a standout if it weren’t for Stone.
Because despite the success of Poor Things, this is certainly Stone’s best performance. She’s constantly playing two people at once, whether it’s with Asher, Dougie, her parents, the Native people of Española, or anyone else she might come across. On the outside, Whitney is the happy wife, the helpful outsider, or the loving daughter, but each and every facial expression, mannerism, or word uttered is carefully designed to make her seem like as good of a person as possible. Because that’s the only motivation behind her charity and niceness: It’s all fake and it’s all performative. The show is interested in the ways that kindness and goodness can be heavily calculated not for the people who are having the good deeds done to them, but for the sake of the person performing the deeds attempting to make themself look better. It’s frankly a highly cynical (if not potentially honest, based on the experiences of the creators) reading of humanity.
Dougie is an extension of this idea, but he never pretends to be a better person than he is. In fact, he spends much of the show trying to get absolution for the death of his wife, who died due to a crash when Dougie was driving drunk. The show kind of loses focus on that thread as it goes on, but it never abandons the manipulation of reality that Dougie brings to Fliplanthropy as the producer. To wit, the very first scene of the show depicts Dougie pouring a little bit of water in a woman’s eye to make it look like she is crying tears of happiness thanks to the Siegels’ kindness, when in reality, what they’ve done is far more of a hassle. Dougie continues these practices as the season goes on, and it just becomes more blatant, with Whitney sometimes at his side.
In that sense, The Curse can often feel like auto critique. The premise of Nathan For You was Fielder helping small business owners, who were often minorities. But once he got in a room with them, the idea that he’d come up with thanks to his “really good grades” at “one of Canada’s top business schools” were patently ridiculous. The Rehearsal explores the idea of reality TV itself, and the subterfuge at its heart. But The Curse frames the hosts and producer of its central show as unambiguously bad people, largely being out for themselves and not actually caring about the people who they purport to help.
I’ve been dancing around it, but the season finale is literally unpredictable. So much so that I won’t even begin to discuss any details. But it does pay off the idea of the curse itself that hangs over the entirety of the show, and it squarely places blame on its three leads for any and all problems that occur. It fully outs Whitney as phony, Asher as without consideration for others, and Dougie for conniving, and it pays off with compassion for the people who all three of them unendingly take from in so many different ways, all while making one last statement about the blurred lines between reality and fiction on “reality” TV. And on top of that, it’s able to be one of the more emotionally engaging episodes of TV I saw all year (which emotions it engages, in particular, I’ll keep from mentioning due to spoilers, but they are definitely there).
If The Curse is indeed a one-and-done show as it seems to be based on the finale, it’s everything you could want and ask for from a small, highly unconventional show that’s difficult to stream, but somehow managed to get one of the biggest movie stars in the world to lead it. Led by the minds of Fielder and Safdie, there is much to take away and stew on once the credits on Episode 10 roll. The show, especially in the finale, asks a lot of questions, and it’s not always necessarily interested in answering them. It throws them out there, and leaves you considering that it might just have been a farce the whole time. And if talk show appearances from its star trio are any indication (linked here and here), the confusion and red herrings just might be the point.
Rating: High Side of Liked It
The Curse is currently streaming on Showtime
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