The skin-crawling appeal of “The Curse” is in the way it makes you want to get up from your couch, unzip yourself from your human suit and run your skeleton bones out into the woods where you can be buried and disassociate from civilization for the rest of time.
It’s not often that a piece of filmed entertainment has that kind of effect, which is like weaponized, military grade cringe. (The first three chapters of the 10-episode series were screened for the purposes of this review.) But creators Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie zero in on a winning (losing) formula, centering on a couple filming a reality show for a home improvement network, and passing their seismic lack of self-awareness and the ripple effect it creates on to the viewer.
The couple is Fielder and no less than Academy Award-winner Emma Stone, who play Asher and Whitney Siegel, a married couple pitching a show to HGTV about their supposedly philanthropic efforts to rehabilitate a New Mexico community, through gaudy “sustainable” homes built out of boxy, mirrored exteriors. They’re not outright villains, they just go about everything the complete and total wrong way, their drive-by attempts at do-gooding reeking of white saviorism.
Fielder is the mischievous provocateur who has made awkwardness his stock-in-trade; his 2022 HBO series “The Rehearsal” was such an odd study of human behavior that it read like a training video for aliens trying to assimilate with our species. He and Safdie — one-half of the Safdie brothers duo, who specialize in hyper-charged experiments in anxiety (see “Good Time,” “Uncut Gems”) — make for an unholy combo if the goal is passive, relaxing viewing.
