Review: Trust ‘Disclaimer’ When It Tells You Not to Trust It

“Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate.”

The warning comes early in the Apple TV+ thriller “Disclaimer,” as spoken by the journalist Christiane Amanpour. She appears in the series to present an award to a documentarian named Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), who is herself about to become the target of a malicious narrative intended to ruin her.

Plant your feet too firmly in your assumptions, Amanpour’s speech tells us, and you may take a tumble. Consider this the disclaimer of “Disclaimer.”

Audiences have already learned this lesson countless times — from “Gone Girl,” from “Rashomon,” from “The Affair,” from any number of stories-about-stories and tales of unreliable or competing narratives. But the warnings, overt and oblique, come repeatedly in “Disclaimer,” a seven-part adaptation by Alfonso Cuarón (“Roma,” “Children of Men”) of a 2015 thriller novel by Renée Knight.

This is the series’s selling point and its problem. It spends so much time and care building a trap with its meta-story that its actual story suffers in the process.

The aforementioned meta-story arrives at Catherine’s home in an envelope with no return address, in the form of “The Perfect Stranger,” a pseudonymously published novel that, she realizes with horror and nausea, details a terrible secret from her past. She is the book’s villain and its target. “Any resemblance to persons living or dead,” the front matter reads, “is not a coincidence.”

The book’s arrival is the work of Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), an embittered retiree whose wife, Nancy (Lesley Manville), and son, Jonathan (Louis Partridge), have died, leaving Stephen alone on a mission of vengeance whose reasons “Disclaimer” unfolds slowly.

Copies of the novel follow Catherine like explosive drones, and everyone who reads it describes its unnamed antagonist in damning, often misogynistic terms. This includes her son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a once-sweet boy grown into a sour, aimless 25-year-old who recoils from Catherine but is close to her diffident husband, Robert (Sacha Baron-Cohen, playing staidly against type).

“Disclaimer,” which begins on Friday, has something to say about perspectives and prejudices, and it doesn’t mind repeating it. It gives dueling voice-overs to the intertwined journeys of Stephen, who prosecutes his elaborate scheme like a tweedy Walter White, and Catherine, who spirals into rage and defensiveness as she grows exposed, driven by a despair whose causes she can’t bring herself to voice.

Cuarón has said that he adapted “Disclaimer” as a series because he saw no way of compressing the story into the space of a feature film. I must take him at his word. But the added length does little to deepen the characterization of either antagonist, while it undercuts the spring-loaded tension of its source thriller material.

You know there is some sort of reversal coming — I won’t tell, you may guess anyway — if for no other reason than how stridently so many characters insist they already know the truth. But at seven episodes, the tale is stretched to the length of a railroad line, and one waits for the coming turn as if for a delayed train.

At seven episodes, you have more time on your hands. Time to contemplate holes in the plot and logic that a two-hour movie might have efficiently whisked you by. Time to watch an excellent cast hit the same beats of grief and despair over and over.

You also spend a great deal of time in scenes that dramatize the (intentionally) overheated novel-within-a-series, in which a young Catherine (Leila George) and Jonathan cross paths. There is a point to the melodrama and the luridness of this narrative, but you still have to sit through it. You may wonder if you are watching a badly told good story or a well-told bad story and whether, in the end and at this investment of time, there is a difference.

The difference, if there is one, comes from how well Cuarón realizes his fictional and metafictional worlds. A story that is all about the power of point-of-view benefits from his eye. His camera doesn’t miss a meaningful gesture, gaze or gasp of passion. He wraps the gloomy English present in a damp chill; burnished scenes of the past seem to be touched by God’s own light. In the series’s straight-ahead thriller sections, he excels at building tension and staging horror.

And there is something to be said for this layered tale’s execution. You can notice a thousand “Beware: Falling Footwear” signs and still be impressed by the aerial ballet when the shoe at long last drops. “Disclaimer” can feel cold and lacking in empathy — the difficulty of empathizing is in many ways its subject — but Blanchett and Kline find a tragic humanity in their characters, the pain behind Catherine’s panicked rage and Stephen’s curdled creepiness.

Still, “Disclaimer” is easier to admire than to enjoy. It grows increasingly and unproductively grim as it builds toward its well-telegraphed moral. It is the kind of accomplishment that you remember not emotionally but mechanically; you want to spread the parts out on a workbench and examine how they fit together.

If that’s less than satisfying, you can’t say you weren’t warned. Beware of narrative and form.