'The Curse', when the curse is you

When the childishly wealthy, clumsy, and carefreely cruel couple that form Whit and Asher, the protagonists of the most uncomfortably brilliant series of the moment, that artifact of extremely dark humor called

The Curse

(SkyShowTime), decide to play house, they don't do it. in his room but in the real world.

That is to say, he buys houses that once belonged to someone who has not been able to continue paying for them and turns them into an abominable thing full of mirrors - they do not look like houses, but mountains of reflections, something not at all coincidental - and he makes them, of course,

sustainable

, and very expensive, so that the only ones who can access them are as rich as them.

This inevitably threatens to destroy the surprised community of Hispaniola, the corner of New Mexico where this dumb and dumb couple aims to become famous.

Because, yes, everything that is going to happen there is going to be recorded.

Ash (a particularly Martian Nathan Fielder here) and Whit (Emma Stone and the unbearable lightness of the most pampered character of her career) are going to star in their own

reality show

, something called

Filantrophy

, directed by a guy who won't stop talking about his dead wife. and who buries his car keys under the trees, Dougie (a sinisterly disastrous Benny Safdie).

But first they're going to have to sell it to HGTV—the television network—and they're not going to care about anything until that happens.

Because they had a great idea.

They are going to become famous for creating a town of

passive

houses - non-polluting - and helping the community, offering jobs that do not exist in exclusive pants franchises and exclusive cafes that only open their doors when filming is taking place.

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They want, Ash and Whit, to be good people.

And they believe that they can become one by pretending, in front of the cameras, that they are.

Because, in their world, there is no such thing as what one is, but only what one seems to be.

Here is the epicenter of the fiction that, by the way, is written and directed by Fielder and Safdie themselves, increasingly wiser when it comes to narrative discomfort, and the bizarre

sketch

is concerned: attentive to the first meeting between Ash and Ash's father Whit, how they brag, crestfallen, about how small that thing they have down there is.

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 curious thing in the case of the main couple is that they do not know how to pretend, because they have not had to do it, money has freed them from having to do it.

It is fascinating the way in which, based on an often digressive narration, which is lost following the characters, so clumsily angry at times - like two spoiled children who kick when something does not go their way, that is, for example, that the owners of the houses do not behave as they believe they should, because they are, like the land, theirs—manages to delve into the systemic coldness, the psychopathy, of every mechanism of representation.

That is, in the mechanism of the contemporary world, which uses itself as fungible material, something to edit and format before showing again.

Like in that scene where Ash and Whit do something ridiculous and they think it's funny and they try to reconstruct it to upload it to Instagram, and it's, of course, impossible for them.

All of us, like the inhabitants of Hispaniola, to a greater or lesser extent, are victims today of a global narcissistic experiment, which, on a small scale, and with a, at times,

Lynchian

mix of comedy and horror, is being carried out by Ash and Whit, an, on the other hand, weak, very lost marriage of children who have never had to grow up, nor learn to live together, who are governed only by what they believe is right because it seems so, or will seem so.

They are a couple of cowards, moreover, who get rid of all blame with a false smile and the appropriate transmission of that blame—what was said and should not have been said—to any of their infinite employees.

And what happens when they come across someone, a girl, who they can't control, and that girl—hence the title—puts a curse on them?

Who tremble with fear, and almost lose their minds.

The curious thing is that she is indeed playing—there is a viral challenge underway—but they, who do not understand the figurative meaning, or the possibility that it exists, who live, paradoxically, in a reality in which literality prevails— in a reality that has nothing to do with reality—they become convinced that everything can go wrong for them because of that child.

The takeaway arrived without chicken, and had that happened before?

The absurdity of what the girl's curse could be affecting them - that she is about to lose, because of the couple, much more than the chicken on a take-out plate - triggers the condition of a sick black hole of Ash and Whit, an uncomfortable stone in the world's shoe.

Because they are the curse.

Something unstoppable and senseless that seeks to devastate, capriciously and unconsciously, that corner of the planet.

Fielder and Safdie invent a formula that is also cursed in some sense for such a peculiar device, which allows a collision between the real world but full of traps - traps that in the narrative hold up planes before uncomfortable moments that reveal what is really behind the characters: all their racism, their insecurity, their exacerbated fear of the unknown, and the unknown is everything, anything—and the toy world in which the protagonists believe they are living.

A world with which they can play as they please, but which actually plays with them, because in the end, they are their own rabidly uncontrolled dolls.

They will never have seen anything like it, nor will they have ever laughed so perversely.

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