Christopher Nolan is one of the most revered men in Hollywood. With films like The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar or Oppenheimer, the most nominated film of the next edition of the Oscars, he showed that it was possible to combine the search for artistic quality with box office performance. And what is the series that fascinates you because it is “incredible” and “like nothing he has seen before”? The curse by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie.
“There are very few series that come in that genuinely have no precedent,” he said during a conversation with Fielder and Safdie. Yes, he may be involved in promoting Oppenheimer to win the statuettes for best film, adapted screenplay and direction, but at this time he found a moment to talk with Fielder and Safdie, who precisely worked in the nuclear series as an actor: he played the physicist Edward Teller in a supporting role.
In Nolan’s opinion, you have to go back to television classics such as The Prisoner by Patrick McGoohan, The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter or Twin Peaks by David Lynch and Mark Frost to find works that occupy this same artistic space. He draws her attention to how the star of The Curse is “the tone” created by Fielder and Safdie, who produce, write, direct and star in the film with Emma Stone in the cast.
You can understand Nolan’s fixation. The curse is an unclassifiable work that, despite being able to be defined in a bizarre way as a psychological satire, has elements of black comedy, drama and even thriller, without fully understanding if it also falls within the supernatural genre.
The idea arose from an informal conversation between Fielder and Safdie, who admired each other and decided to start a friendship. Fielder, known for The Rehearsal, told him that on his first visit to Los Angeles someone cursed at him on the street and he, worried about the situation, took out money from an ATM so that it would be taken away after a few minutes. Benny Safdie, who often works with his brother Joshua in films like Diamonds in the Rough, posed an idea to him: What would have happened if he hadn’t found that person and removed the curse?
In The Curse, Fielder and Stone are Asher and Whitney Siegel, who try to sell a home renovation program using the fact that she is an architect. They have the help of an unscrupulous producer (Safdie), who is convinced that they will be able to place the project on a television channel. The issue is that it is not just a house renovation program: they sell it as an activist tool to improve a depressed population but, in reality, their objective is to gentrify it in order to recover the investment they have made in the area.
The tone, straddling the genres mentioned above, implies that each scene is an experience in itself. There is social criticism, an x-ray of privilege, other people’s shame or deep concern while the protagonists are execrable beings. As we stated in the review published at the time, this also leads to questioning whether this is the most convenient format for a slow, unpleasant and uncomfortable work: why extend the bet to 10 episodes?
But, if you have to look for rarities, Nolan is right: The curse is unlike anything we can see on television right now. If you want to see it, it’s on SkyShowtime.
