If asked what they thought of a television pitch that saw a married couple hosting an HGTV show that went comically wrong due to a curse put on them, the average viewer would probably think it sounded like a fun idea. That’s what everyone thought they were getting when the news of “The Curse” first came out. They did, in some sense, get that TV show. However, the show that they actually got goes above and beyond that dumb premise and proves that Nathan Fielder, Benny Safdie, and Emma Stone are all geniuses in their own right.
“The Curse” is set in Española, New Mexico, and finds Whitney (Stone) and her husband Asher (Fielder) attempting to film the first season of an HGTV show produced by Dougie (Safdie). However, unlike other HGTV shows that skew towards a more conservative audience, Whitney and Asher’s show, “Flipanthropy,” is focused on a go-green motto. They purchase land and build Whitney’s climate-conscious homes in an attempt to reverse the damage humanity has done to the climate.
At the front end, this appears to be an altruistic effort, for all of about twenty minutes, until the viewer is let in on where Whitney gets the funds for these outrageously expensive homes. Her so-called “slumlord” parents own copious amounts of low-income real estate that have far from acceptable living conditions for its predominantly minority residents.
Despite this horrific underbelly of Whitney’s family tree, she promptly shuts down any insinuation that she has any connection with her parents whatsoever, all the while accepting funds from them whenever she pleases. Not only this, but the unfathomable cost of the homes she is building being unattainable to the low-income residents whose town she is gentrifying appears entirely lost on her.
The city of Española, as is common in the southwestern region, is filled with indigenous people. Despite Whitney and Asher’s best attempts to virtue signal their way into the respect of the town’s indigenous people, their patronizing fetishization of Native American spirituality is as uncomfortable as it is laughable. Many scenes feature the two of them falling for blatant sarcastic stereotypes presented by the indigenous natives making fun of them, and it doesn’t get any easier to watch this painful awkwardness as the show progresses.
The show does not stop there with making the viewer uncomfortable, and when the topic of Asher’s genitalia repeatedly comes up, you’ll even find yourself wishing you were back to watching the scene of Asher painfully rapping Dead Prez and replacing the use of the n-word by just actually saying “n-word.”
The sickeningly awkward writing of this show is carried on the back of Fielder and Safdie’s fascination with non-actors, as well as the three leads’ powerful performances, including what may be Stone’s best body of work. Every scene that features her incredible impersonation of the performative white liberals who treat minorities like animals at the zoo is so real that the viewer nearly starts to harbor bad feelings for Stone herself.
There is so much else that could be talked about in regards to “The Curse,” including a finale that guarantees your jaw is on the floor from start to finish, but the bottom line is that Fielder and Safdie both took the best parts of their filmmaking and blended it beautifully to comedically draw attention to the performativity of upper-class liberals. The Curse is a beautiful dramedy, if even that term could describe a show this bizarre, that sheds light on how disgustingly this nation has continually pillaged the indigenous folks on whose land we reside.
