The Curse Review: Prepare to Cringe All the Way Through This Unsettling Oddity

The Curse is like a clash of the cringe titans. Nathan Fielder is known for uncomfortably awkward prank comedies like Nathan For You and The Rehearsal, and Benny Safdie, along with his brother Josh, is known for uncomfortably tense crime dramas like Uncut Gems and Good Time. So it makes sense that when Fielder and Safdie team up for Showtime’s new dramedy — premiering this Sunday at 10/9c and streaming this Friday on Paramount+; I’ve seen the first four episodes — the result is almost unbearably uncomfortable. A deeply unsettling fusion of Fielder and Safdie’s distinctive styles, The Curse has a few darkly amusing moments and boasts a standout performance from Emma Stone, but it’s a tough watch, too. It’s almost too good at making us squirm.

Fielder and Stone star as newlywed home renovators Asher and Whitney, who are shooting a pilot for a HGTV show titled (hilariously) Flipanthropy. Backed by sleazy reality TV producer Dougie (Benny Safdie), they steamroll their way through a quiet New Mexico community, squeezing out locals while preaching eco-conscious living by building self-sufficient homes with mirrored walls that look like a sci-fi nightmare. But things start snowballing towards despair after Asher has a dispute with a young girl that leads to her putting an ominous curse on him.

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The premise is rich with comedic potential — Fielder and Safdie co-created the series, with Fielder directing most of the episodes — but The Curse is not ha-ha funny as much as it is squirm-in-your-seat funny, with the cringe factor pumped up to 11. (Imagine the “Scott’s Tots” episode of The Office playing on a 24-hour loop, if you can bear it.) To make things even more uncomfortable, it’s infused with the Safdie brothers’ trademark tension, agonizingly turning the screws on its characters; we often see them from a distance with slow zooms inward, like we’re peeking in on their lives. It all amounts to an unpleasant viewing experience, with suffocating levels of secondhand embarrassment.

There’s plenty of material here for savage cultural satire, and Asher and Whitney make for easy targets with their tone-deaf gentrifying crusade and hipster sanctimony. We definitely get some satisfaction from seeing these pretentious millennials have their bubbles of privilege punctured, but other stabs at humor don’t land as well, like outdated reality TV parodies and bizarrely lowbrow jokes about sexual dysfunction. Plus, the plots are too diffuse, getting bogged down by too many subplots and derailed by jarring WTF moments.

Stone is a saving grace here: She’s an Oscar winner for a reason, and she crafts a delicate portrait of Whitney as a cheery TV host with a fragile soul, finding subtle ways to let Whitney’s deep discomfort shine through. Fielder, though, takes some getting used to as a dramatic actor. His deadpan sense of humor is well-honed by now, but when he turns serious, we’re left waiting for a punchline that never comes. That’s a great way to sum up The Curse, actually: It has all the elements of a comedy, but it’d rather see us squirm than laugh, which makes it an intriguing but oddly uneven and unsatisfying series.

THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Showtime’s unsettling new series The Curse has savage satirical bite, but it’s almost too good at making us squirm.

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