“The Curse” PEOPLE Review: Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder Star in a Wild and Disturbing New Series

Stone and Fielder play a couple who get a bitter taste of reality (and reality TV)

The Curse, a new series premiering this weekend on both Showtime and Paramount+ with Showtime, is an epic masterpiece of cringe comedy — 10 weekly episodes of engulfing discomfort, pain and despair.

Whether you laugh or not is almost beside the point. You will, actually, but your knees will remain unslapped and there won’t be many giggles, snorts or guffaws to fill the empty air of your room. Laughter here doesn't sound too far off from a death rattle.

I have a feeling I’m not selling the show very well. So, for now, let’s pile on the superlatives and say that The Curse is unsparing, daring, endlessly fascinating, altogether extraordinary and bracingly original. Better?

Asher and Whitney Siegel (Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone) are an ambitious, smart yet curiously clueless couple: They’re in Española, N. Mex., shooting the pilot episode of what they hope will be a new HGTV series with them as hosts.

Related: Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder Are Husband and Wife House Flippers in The Curse: 'What Could Go Wrong?'

The working title: Fliplanthropy. The concept: They’ll build and sell mirror-sheathed ecohomes (going price: $800,000-plus) while also finding new houses and jobs for the minority residents destined (regrettably) to be displaced by rising property values triggered by the Siegels’s building project.

Whitney is preeningly sensitive to the area’s Indigenous culture but also slightly condescending. Asher is clammy, hot-tempered and cloddish. He always looks as if he's wilting in the sun, like escarole thrown into a sauté pan.

Their producer, Dougie (Benny Safdie), previously concocted a gruesome Bachelor knockoff (we see a clip), and is inordinately proud of it. He has long dank hair, parted in the middle, that gives him the air of a failed Apostle or Al Yankovic after a trim.  He's repugnant.

Safdie and Fielder are co-creators of The Curse, and both of them are experts in discomfort. Safdie directed (with brother Josh) the excruciatingly intense Adam Sandler 2019 film Uncut Gems. Fielder is best known for the squirm-inducing series The Rehearsal. It’s hard to imagine what they must be like together when they're off somewhere collaborating — do they make each other’s skin crawl, then call it a day? If they’d directed The Lord of the Rings, it would have been nothing but Golom.

Related: Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder Are Knocking Down Walls in First Look for The Curse

I suspect I still haven’t made you believe this show is worth your time. You might be thinking that you could just as easily rewatch Ted Lasso. Hannah Waddingham is so zesty and charming!

What Safdie and Fielder have created on Curse, at least on the surface level, is a sharp, unstinting satire of White privilege and guilt (Whitney is constantly having to distance herself from her parents, who are widely regarded as slumlords). It’s also an expert parody of reality programming and its dishonesty. But Curse is really an uncomfortably intimate and nuanced portrait of the Siegels's fraying marriage.

It’s as if filmmaker Albert Brooks directed Jon & Kate Plus 8. (Brooks is the subject of an excellent new documentary on Max, Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, launching Nov. 11.)

The Siegels are constantly having to remove obstacles that crop up in their planned path to success. One of those obstacles is, as the title suggests, a curse. It's cast on John by an angry little girl named Nala (Hikmah Warsame) after he tries to backtrack on a generous gesture — he gave her $100— filmed as extra footage for the show. Nala may in fact have a supernatural power, although it’s manifested mostly in terms of the chicken that's mysteriously missing from John’s pasta supper.

The curse may be one of the reasons the Siegels begin drifting apart. Then again, the real issue may be that Whitney, played by Stone with an exquisitely subtle palette of hostility and cunning, realizes she’s the one with the on-camera presence of a true HGTV star. But our sympathies — to the extent that we genuinely sympathize with anyone on Curse–keep shifting. Asher's feelings run deeper than you'd expect, so deep you almost wish he were shallow. Even Dougie turns out to be vulnerable.

None of this will prepare you for The Curse’s ending, which is exhilaratingly funny yet absolutely terrifying. It will make you rethink the entire series, and also maybe wonder if you didn't catch your own reflection in one of the Siegels's mirrored houses.

By now you must be itching to watch The Curse. Aren't you?

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The Curse's first episode launches Friday on Paramount+ with Showtime, and premieres on Showtime Sunday at 10 p.m.

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