[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 1 finale of The Curse, “Green Queen.”]
For a show that constantly threatened supernatural carnage, The Curse often opted to let the audience’s imagination fill in the blanks. Was the “tiny curse” that Nala (Hikmah Warsame) placed on Asher (Nathan Fielder) in the first episode real? Does she have powers, and is she actually summoning chickens (or making them disappear) to toy with Asher’s psyche? When Dougie (Benny Safdie) curses Asher at the conclusion of Episode 8, does that somehow manifest in his reality?
These are just a few questions that reflect the kind of mystical grey area that creators Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie seemed intent on exploring. Similar to the way superstition and fate worked in Safdie’s Uncut Gems, The Curse builds its narrative like a balloon filled with suffocating carbon dioxide, and watching each episode felt like that balloon could burst at any minute.
It nearly happened in the show’s penultimate episode when Whitney (Emma Stone) decided to show Asher the more merciless cut of Green Queen — the most overt acknowledgment of Asher’s shortcomings as a partner and as a man thus far. But Asher’s unexpected epiphany backfires on Whitney, who can only sit in horror and fear as Asher steamrolls her (it’s also Fielder’s single greatest performance in the show).
However, after such caustic tension throughout the whole season, The Curse‘s finale does not end with explosiveness — instead of popping, the balloon continues to expand. Also, that balloon metaphor becomes a lot more direct.
On the day that Whitney goes into labor, Asher wakes up on the ceiling, unable to reverse his gravitational center. He literally cannot stand on the ground. The episode continues with Asher eventually landing in a tree and holding on for dear life, all while Whitney goes to the hospital for the delivery and Dougie attempts to “console” Asher about his fears of becoming a dad. No one believes Asher when he tries to explain his gravitational predicament, and he ends up floating away to his death.
Several preceding elements perhaps shed light on Asher’s fatal ascent, such as the gifting of the Questa Lane property to a mostly indifferent Abshir (Barkhad Abdi), who doesn’t give Whitney and Asher the satisfaction they crave for doing a good deed, and the compromising of the couple’s “Passive House” certification to make sure their baby doesn’t get too hot in the summers.
Yet these events still fail to explain why this insane twist happens to Asher. What does it mean that Asher is pulled by an unknown force into oblivion? And what is that unknown force? For one, it’s easy to read the sequence as a metaphor about being fundamentally ungrounded. Asher has compromised his integrity so many times for the sake of affirming his wife’s righteous identity that it becomes his demise.
It’s also easy to infer that Asher’s tragic end was the original curse from Nala all along — that the punishment for his moments of selfishness are compounded as one irreversible fate. Still, these explanations feel incongruous with the mode of Asher’s death: There were no references or allusions toward ascension, no decisive moment the evening before to suggest Asher will get his comeuppance.
This is another aspect that makes The Curse‘s ending feel incomplete: retribution. It becomes obvious throughout the show that Whitney and Asher are a very specific breed of bad people — the ones who feel they’re doing good things even if their motivation is corrupted, the ones who claim to have respect for oppressed groups but publicly overcompensate so much that it ends up reading as pure performance. Safdie and Fielder show their impact on their surrounding environment through painfully tense dialogue and surveillance-style background action, all cementing that these oblivious figures are overextending themselves too far in a space that never belonged to them in the first place.
The final stretch of the show definitely reflects Asher’s hollow center — despite his actually selfless deed of giving Abshir the house, he certainly deserves some of the carnage dealt to him. But what about Whitney, who is arguably more insidious than Asher and his “tools fix things” approach? She gets her show, her baby, and, to an extent, Española. The only thing she loses is Asher, which, given how much contempt she has for him, is maybe for the best. Other than that, Whitney comes out relatively unscathed — unless a second season is announced where her child is revealed to be the son of Lucifer or something.
Throughout The Curse, as the eerie threat of cruel magic casts a shadow on each episode, you can’t help but expect both Whitney and Asher to be served some kind of karmic justice. The fact that it only arrives for Asher (and happens in such a disconnected, incomprehensible way) gives the ending very little satisfaction and resolve.
Uncut Gems is a perfect comparison point — both projects feature a tense and tenuous buildup to a climactic unravelling, but in Uncut Gems, it culminates in a moment that sums up Howard’s journey completely. Given his despicable behavior in the film, it’s satisfying for the audience to see Howard lose in such a jarring, ultimate fashion, especially after winning big in the film’s final scenes. Howard gets the fate he deserves: winning everything but losing it all in the speck of a moment.
The Curse feels like it’s hurdling towards this, but instead of that deft moment of finality, we’re given a sequence that clouds the mirror around this show. Perhaps Safdie and Fielder wanted to highlight how Whitney and Asher have chosen to ignore the reality of their mission in Española, and therefore, we — the audience — don’t deserve the satisfaction of watching the town serve them back their retribution. But up until the last couple of episodes, it seemed like the show was poised to deliver that one moment where it all falls apart, where Whitney and Asher finally get what they want but the cost is too great.
The Curse has been a charged, nuanced experiment that played with the aesthetics of performance, surveillance, the power imbalances of colonialism, and the damaging consequences of unchecked white guilt. But rather than ending with a visceral moment of clarity, we’re left staring straight back into The Curse‘s warped mirror, as all meaning drifts up into the sky.
The Curse is streaming now on Paramount+