'The Curse' review: Emma Stone, Nathan Fielder, and Benny Safdie are here to break your brains (2024)

From the bizarre business schemes of Nathan for You to the mind-melting experiments of The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder has always had a knack for interrogating the "reality" behind reality television. Now, he teams up with Benny Safide — co-director of nail-biting films like Uncut Gems and Good Time — to continue breaking our brains with the new scripted series, The Curse.

Starring Emma Stone, Fielder, and Safdie, and produced by A24 and Showtime, The Curse defies easy categorization. It's the perfect storm of wince-worthy comedy, HGTV spoof, and surreal (and possibly supernatural?) drama, with plenty of commentary on everything from race to social media thrown in for good measure. As tough as it can be to watch at times — I dare you to go five minutes without cringing — there's no doubt that The Curse is one of the funniest, strangest, and most unsettling shows of the year.

What is The Curse about?

Stone and Fielder play Whitney and Asher Siegel, a married couple at the center of an upcoming HGTV show awkwardly titled Flipanthropy. (Say it three times fast.) Their goal is to build eco-friendly homes in the city of Española, New Mexico, and "revitalize" the community by bringing in upscale coffee chains and jeans stores. It's textbook gentrification, but Whitney and Asher want to distance themselves from that label. In Whitney's perfect world, these new businesses will only employ locals, everyone will buy her passive homes, and she and Asher can subsidize any higher rent Española's current residents may face. "Everybody's a winner," Asher tells a local reporter (Tessa Mentus) when she brings up the dreaded "G word."

Of course, Asher's blithe statement couldn't be farther from the truth. The new businesses are more a front for Flipanthropy than they are new staples in Española, and Whitney's plan to subsidize rent is just a Band-Aid lazily slapped on America's much bigger issues. Then there are the passive homes themselves, with their garish mirrored facades that Whitney proudly says, "reflect the community." If anything, the constant reflection is more of a visual nuisance for Asher and Whitney's neighbors. It doesn't help that the deceptive mirrors lead to the deaths of birds who fly smack dab into the walls. When bird corpses are a common occurrence around your house, maybe it's time to rethink whether it's as environmentally friendly as you claim it is.

Capturing Whitney and Asher's so-called service work on camera is their producer Dougie Schechter (Safdie). He'll try anything to make the show as entertaining as possible, no matter the ethics. Take the very first scene, which sees him pouring water on a woman's face to create the illusion of a tearful response. It's just one of many exploitative tricks he'll use on his subjects in order to shape a new reality for the camera. Whitney and Asher are initially put off by these methods, unable to see that they, too, are exploiting the residents of Española.

One of Dougie's filming plans leads us to The Curse's titular malediction. When he sees a young girl named Nala (Hikmah Warsame) selling sodas in a parking lot, Dougie tells Asher to give her some money, thinking it'll make good B-roll for the show. Asher hands her the only cash he has on him — a $100 bill — and immediately tries to take it back once they've stopped filming. Nala, understandably upset by this turn of events, proceeds to fix her gaze on Asher and deliver three fateful words: "I curse you."

From there on out, things are... off with Asher, Whitney, and the production. There's conflict with potential home buyers, complications with Asher and Whitney's plans to conceive, and even discord in their marriage. Are all these bumps in the road Nala and the curse's doing? Or were these problems always there, and did Asher and Whitney only start to notice them with the threat of a curse hanging over their heads? (Notably, the two also argue about whether it's racist to assume Nala is even capable of cursing them.)

The Curse skewers reality TV with surreal stylings and a tinge of horror.

The Curse plays with just how real Nala's curse is over the course of its 10 episodes. Strange events on the set of Flipanthropy are commonplace, yet they could just as easily be attributed to human error as to magic. However, The Curse doesn't rule out the supernatural outright. Horror-adjacent imagery appears throughout, from the dead birds to long shots tracking characters' movements that would be right at home in a slasher. Discussions of troubled pregnancy invoke the subgenre of motherhood horror, and composer John Medeski (working with music producer and frequent Safdie collaborator Daniel Lopatin) crafts a soundscape that wrings unease out of even the most mundane moments.

The ambiguity of the curse plays into the show's larger fascination with how we engineer and interact with false narratives. Reality TV serves as the prime source of artifice here, with Asher and especially Whitney crafting how their marriage and their work comes across onscreen. If enough people believe the fantasy they're being sold, does that make it true? And if you spend your relationship living for the camera, how can you tell what's real or not?

To further hammer home these ideas of warped reality, The Curse makes liberal use of mirror shots and distorted mirror imagery. It pairs these with shots of conversations framed in windows or doorways, or filmed from a great distance, lending the show a voyeuristic quality. What are we truly meant to be seeing?

The Curse's main characters will make you cringe and laugh (but mostly cringe).

The Curse's preoccupation with artifice manifests itself most in Whitney. She cares so much about her self-image that she forces Asher to recreate their cutest moments beat-for-beat for her Instagram followers. Her activism is a facade as well — although she may not be self-aware enough to realize that. She fervently claims to support Española's residents, including the Pueblo people of New Mexico. However, she frequently uses and tokenizes the Native Americans she meets, like her artist friend Cara Durand (Nizhonniya Luxi Austin). In a show full of moments that make you want to crawl out of your skin, Whitney's interactions with Cara are among the most horrifying.

Asher is no stranger to fantasy either, with The Curse relishing unpicking his self-imposed ideas of masculinity. Between jokes about penis size and being called Whitney's "jester" instead of her "king," Asher goes through the humiliation gauntlet with a brave face that is always seconds from slipping. Then there's Dougie, whose sleazy producer persona masks a deeper sadness and some wildly unhealthy coping mechanisms.

With these three characters and their conflicting senses of self firmly in place, The Curse simmers with an at-times unbearable awkwardness. Will you feel a combination of embarrassment and disgust toward Whitney, Asher, and Dougie's actions? Yes. Will you occasionally recognize yourself in them? Horrifyingly, also yes. When broader moments of comedy arise — like the aforementioned penis jokes — they come as a welcome, tension-breaking relief. Yet The Curse refuses to let you get comfortable for long. Often, these laugh-out-loud jokes will resurface down the line in an even more squirm-worthy scene, as if The Curse is wielding your own prior comfort against you.

Emma Stone, Nathan Fielder, and Benny Safdie make for an excellent trio in The Curse.

The Curse wouldn't work half as well as it does without the total commitment of Stone, Fielder, and Safdie, who make for an unlikely (but well-matched) supergroup. Stone has already proven her comedic chops ten times over with films like Easy A and The Favourite, but The Curse may be her funniest turn yet. Whitney's eco-influencer jargon is gold in Stone's hands, but she blends it with a discomfiting sense of artificiality completely in sync with the tone Fielder and Safdie have created. It's pitch-perfect work, and when paired with the release of Poor Things, it helps mark a banner year for Stone.

In a departure from shows like Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, Fielder is not playing a version of himself but rather an entirely new character. Still, you'll recognize elements of his prior performances in Asher's awkward deadpan. He's a total punching bag for the show, with Flipanthropy focus groups wondering why Whitney would even marry him. That disbelief makes it all the funnier — and uncomfortable, naturally — when Asher inevitably loses his cool. Prepare yourself for some angry, desperate rants from Fielder that will leave you speechless, and some especially inspired physical comedy in later episodes.

As Dougie, Safdie is slippery and scummy, the ideal contrast to Whitney's earnest(ish) idealism. While shooting Flipanthropy, he reads as a dirtbag Machiavellian schemer looking to get the perfect shot — even at the expense of people like Asher. But in his personal life, he's a flailing mess. Here, Safdie must shoulder some of The Curse's most painful revelations, resulting in tragi-comic scenes like a first date gone off the rails.

These three off-the-wall performances combine with The Curse's ambitious genre-bending to make for one of 2023's most original TV series yet. It's densely layered with bizarro comedy, bold set pieces, and pertinent social criticism. Yes, Asher, Whitney, and Dougie's convictions may be hollow, but The Curse is filled to the brim with things to say — and some absolutely wild ways to say them.

The Curse premieres on Paramount+ with Showtime on Nov. 10.

UPDATE: Nov. 6, 2023, 10:33 a.m. EST A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Dahabo Ahmed plays Nala, who is in fact played by Hikmah Warsame. Ahmed plays Hani, Nala's older sister.