When the childishly wealthy, clumsy and carelessly cruel couple that make up Whit and Asher, the protagonists of the most unpleasantly brilliant series of the moment, that artifact of extremely dark humor called The Curse (SkyShowTime), decide to play house, they don't do it it not. In his room but in the real world. That is, he buys houses that once belonged to someone who was no longer able to pay for them, and turns them into hideous things full of mirrors – they don't look like houses, but like mountains of reflections, something that not at all is a coincidence – and of course he makes them sustainable and very expensive, so that the only people who can access them are as rich as they are. This inevitably threatens to destroy the surprised community of Hispaniola, the corner of New Mexico where this stupid and stupid couple wants to become famous.
Because yes, everything that will happen there will be recorded. Ash (here a particularly Martian Nathan Fielder) and Whit (Emma Stone and the unbearable lightness of the most spoiled character of her career) will star in their own reality show, something called Filantrophy, directed by a man who doesn't want to stop he's talking about his dead wife and the guy who buries his car keys under the trees, Dougie (an eerily catastrophic Benny Safdie). But first they have to sell it to HGTV, the television network, and until then they won't care. Because they had a great idea. They will become famous for creating a city of passive houses – environmentally friendly – and helping the community by offering jobs that don't exist in exclusive pants franchises and exclusive cafes that only open their doors during filming.
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They, Ash and Whit, want to be good people. And they believe they can become one by pretending to be one in front of the cameras. Because in their world there is no such thing as what you are, only what you appear to be. Here lies the epicenter of the fiction, which, incidentally, is written and directed by Fielder and Safdie themselves, increasingly clever when it comes to narrative inconvenience and the bizarre sketch: attentive to the first meeting between Ash and Ash's father Whit, as they dejectedly brag about it how small that thing is down there. The mirror game of reality today involves what others see about you, something that sometimes has nothing to do with you unless your ability to pretend counts. The strange thing in the case of the main couple is that they don't know how to pretend because they didn't have to do it, the money freed them from having to do it.
It's fascinating how, based on an often digressive narrative, the tracking of the characters, who are at times so awkwardly angry, is lost – like two spoiled children who kick when something doesn't go their way, that is to say Example that the owners of the houses do not behave as they believe they should because they belong to them like the land – and manages to deal with the systemic coldness, the psychopathy of every representation mechanism. That is, in the mechanism of today's world, using itself as a fungible material, something that needs to be edited and formatted before being shown again. Like that scene where Ash and Whit do something ridiculous and think it's funny and try to recreate it to upload it to Instagram and of course that's impossible for them.
All of us today, like the inhabitants of Hispaniola, are more or less victims of a global narcissistic experiment carried out on a small scale and with a sometimes Lynchian mixture of comedy and horror by Ash and Whit, on the other hand a weak, very lost marriage of Children who never had to grow up, nor had to learn to live together, who are only governed by what they think is right because it seems that way or will seem that way. Furthermore, they are a couple of cowards who dismiss all blame with a fake smile and the appropriate passing of that blame – what was said and what should not have been said – to one of their countless co-workers. And what happens when they come across someone, a girl, who they can't control, and that girl – hence the title – curses them? Who tremble with fear and almost lose their minds.
The strange thing is that she actually plays – there is a viral challenge in progress – but those who do not understand the figurative meaning or the possibility of her existence, who paradoxically live in a reality where literalness prevails – in a reality, which has nothing to do with reality – they are convinced that everything can go wrong for them because of this child. The takeaway arrived without chicken, and had this happened before? The absurdity of what effect the girl's curse might have on them – that because of the couple she will lose much more than the chicken on the take-out plate – triggers Ash and Whit into the state of a sick black hole, an inconvenient stone in the world's shoe . Because they are the curse. Something unstoppable and senseless that wants to wreak havoc on this corner of the planet, randomly and unconsciously.
Fielder and Safdie invent a formula that, in a way, is also cursed for such a peculiar device that allows a collision between the real world, but full of traps – traps that, in the narrative, stop planes from unpleasant moments that reveal what is happening really hides characters behind it: all their racism, their insecurity, their heightened fear of the unknown, and the unknown is everything, everything – and the toy world in which the protagonists believe they live. A world that they can play with as they please, but that actually plays with them, because in the end they are their own rabid, uncontrolled dolls. They will never have seen anything like it, nor will they have ever laughed so perversely.
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