Review: Trust ‘Disclaimer’ When It Tells You Not to Trust It

“Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate.”

The warning comes early in the Apple TV+ thriller “Disclaimer,” as spoken by the journalist Christiane Amanpour. She appears in the series to present an award to a documentarian named Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), who is herself about to become the target of a malicious narrative intended to ruin her.

Plant your feet too firmly in your assumptions, Amanpour’s speech tells us, and you may take a tumble. Consider this the disclaimer of “Disclaimer.”

Audiences have already learned this lesson countless times — from “Gone Girl,” from “Rashomon,” from “The Affair,” from any number of stories-about-stories and tales of unreliable or competing narratives. But the warnings, overt and oblique, come repeatedly in “Disclaimer,” a seven-part adaptation by Alfonso Cuarón (“Roma,” “Children of Men”) of a 2015 thriller novel by Renée Knight.

This is the series’s selling point and its problem. It spends so much time and care building a trap with its meta-story that its actual story suffers in the process.

The aforementioned meta-story arrives at Catherine’s home in an envelope with no return address, in the form of “The Perfect Stranger,” a pseudonymously published novel that, she realizes with horror and nausea, details a terrible secret from her past. She is the book’s villain and its target. “Any resemblance to persons living or dead,” the front matter reads, “is not a coincidence.”