‘The Curse’ Review: Emma Stone’s Dark Comedy Is Weird and Unpleasant, but in an Artistic Way

More than any other Oscar-winning actress of her generation, Emma Stone is willing to get weird. She is not afraid to take artistic risks in offbeat projects. But the thing about risks is that they don't always pay off. They did in in The Favourite and Poor Things, Stone's acclaimed collaborations with director Yorgos Lanthimos. But they don't in The Curse, a Showtime/Paramount+ dark comedy series that Stone executive-produces and stars in. All the individual pieces of The Curse are well-crafted and interesting to think about, but the intentionally harsh way they're put together adds up to something less than the sum of its parts.

The Curse was created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, who also star in the show. Fielder is the mastermind of Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, brilliant reality-comedy hybrids that create bizarre environments that enable people to behave in unexpected ways, with Fielder serving as a deadpan, socially awkward facilitator. And Safdie, with his brother Josh, directed the nerve-jangling thrillers Good Time and Uncut Gems, films that are so tense and sensorily overwhelming that they're physically uncomfortable to watch (in a good way). With the show, Fielder and Safdie take the discomfiting elements of their prior work and stretch them out over 10 patience-testing hours.

Stone and Fielder star as Whitney and Asher Siegel, a married couple who experience strange and bad things while making an HGTV real estate show. Their show is supposed to document their business building avant-garde, eco-friendly homes in Española, New Mexico, in the hopes of turning the gritty town into a desirable destination for people with money. They intend to do it respectfully and consciously, without gentrifying and forcing Española's poor, nonwhite current residents out of the community. Of course, that idea only works on paper, and everything that can go wrong does. The houses aren't selling, they're spending all their money to keep the project afloat, and no one in Española likes them. And all their misfortune may be due to a curse placed on Asher by a little girl to whom he gave $100, only to take it back from her when he thought the cameras were off.

Asher's and Whitney's own character defects make everything worse. Whitney is a clueless rich white woman who tries to deal with her liberal guilt (her parents are notorious Santa Fe slumlords) by imposing her will on the world around her, while Asher is a selfish, spineless weirdo with no empathy and a nasty temper. As the tensions mount, their relationship hits the rocks. Safdie plays Dougie Schecter, the show's producer, who conducts Asher and Whitney's discord like a reality TV Leonard Bernstein, his fingers dripping in silver rings like Elan Gale.

Pros

Cons

The show deals with themes of race, class, crime and masculinity in uncomfortable ways that antagonize the political sensibilities of the show's target demographic (it's produced by A24, the prestige darling of indie cinema). Asher's small penis size is an important plot point. Outspoken Trump supporter Dean Cain has a funny cameo role. The comedy is of the cringe variety, where oblivious, socially inept people make fools of themselves. And the emotional discomfort is combined with discomfort-producing technical choices in the filmmaking to create maximum unease.

Safdie and Fielder do everything they can to keep the audience off-balance. They move the plot along very slowly as they luxuriate in self-indulgently overlong scenes. They linger on people's faces for agonizingly long moments, watching them hold fake smiles until they look like lunatic grimaces. They shoot scenes from a distance, through windshields and chainlink fences, creating a feeling of voyeurism. The blown-out colors are intentionally ugly, with desaturated color correction that turns Stone and Fielder pale as ghosts. It's presented in a claustrophobic aspect ratio that cuts off the top and bottom of the frame.

It all makes for a grueling viewing experience. The Curse's aggressively off-putting style is hard to stomach for a season of this length. This type of uncompromising uneasiness works in more concentrated doses in Benny Safdie's movies and Nathan Fielder's half-hour reality show episodes, but it doesn't when the viewer has to tune in week-to-week. The pace is so languid, the atmosphere is so alienating, and the characters and humor are so abrasive that all but the most devoted fans of challenging art will have checked out by the time the setup starts to pay off in the second half of the season.

But even though The Curse doesn't click overall, its components are individually strong. The lead performances are uniformly terrific, with Stone fearless as usual, becoming more alive the darker she goes, and Fielder finding new dimensions to his awkward persona in the biggest scripted acting role of his career. And Safdie makes you feel for an unbearable douchebag's pain. The supporting cast is great, too, especially Barkhad Abdi, Hikmah Warsame and Dahabo Ahmed as a Somali family who get entangled with the Siegels. The satire of rich, well-meaning narcissists who think their version of capitalism isn't exploitative because they do land acknowledgements is provocative and funny. And producer Daniel Lopatin and keyboardist John Medeski's minimalistic score is haunting.

The producers of The Curse succeeded in what they set out to do. They wanted to make an exceptionally unpleasant show, and they did. Their commitment is admirable. But it doesn't make their show enjoyable. 6.0/10

Release date: Series premieres on-demand on Friday, Nov. 10 via Showtime and Paramount+ with Showtime, followed by its cable debut on Showtime on Sunday, Nov. 12 at 10/9c.

Who's in it: Emma Stone, Nathan Fielder, Benny Safdie, Barkhad Abdi, Nizhonniya Luxi Austin, Constance Shulman, Corbin Bernsen

Who's behind it: Creators and stars Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie (Fielder directs multiple episodes), star and executive producer Emma Stone, studios Showtime and A24

For fans of: Uncut Gems, The Rehearsal, feeling really, really uncomfortable

Avoid if: You can't handle secondhand embarrassment

Number of episodes watched: 10 (of 10) 

Where to watch: Paramount+ with Showtime