If you’ve seen or read enough stories about vengeance, chances are good you’ve encountered the saying, “He who seeks revenge digs two graves,” or some variation. Likely misattributed to Confucius, its meaning nonetheless carries weight. The new drama Disclaimer wrestles with the adage far more seriously than most other takes on the act of seeking catharsis through reprisal.

Teacher Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline) has just finished self-destructively barreling into his own firing, quite the fall for a former Teacher of the Year. He’s alone, a widower, his wife Nancy (Lesley Manville) dead after a protracted time with cancer. However, in many ways, he’s been alone since their son Jonathan (Louis Partridge) died about two decades earlier. That’s when his wife began to pull away from him and didn’t stop until her death.

With his newfound time, he begins to clean out the closets and wardrobes left unused since her passing. Among the debris, he discovers a series of objects that lead to a manuscript. In its pages, Nancy lays out their son’s final days in Italy. More importantly, she places the blame for his death firmly at the feet of Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett). Catherine is now a highly successful documentary filmmaker married to financier Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) with an adult son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee).

But back when Jonathan met her, Nancy’s book alleges, Catherine (Leila George in the flashbacks) was a young mom unhappy and alone with her young child (George Haarer). The manuscript goes on to suggest she and Jonathan had a brief but intensely sexual relationship, an allegation backed up by a stack of provocative photos taken with Jonathan’s camera. After their affair, Jonathan drowned, helping to save young Nicholas’s life.

With these revelations, the listless Stephen finds a new spark. He will, systematically, destroy Catherine with the book. She needs to pay for Jonathan’s death—and, by extension, the loss of Nancy. Stephen’s just the man to make it happen.

For much of the season, writer-director Alfonso Cuarón, adapting Renée Knight’s novel, plunges the viewers into this disturbing plan. They ride alongside Stephen as he enacts a campaign that’s a mix of harassment, embarrassment, isolation, and assault. While not a Funny Games in either tone or misanthropy, it forces the audience to ask similar questions of itself by the time the dust settles. Regardless of what Catherine might be guilty of, was Stephen’s plot a remotely equivalent response? How willing were the viewers to go along with it, and why? On its face, it is a vicious and cruel act, but it is Disclaimer’s seductive power that most won’t feel that until long after they should. And this critic does, sadly, include himself amongst that “they.”

Besides Cuarón’s hand, Kline’s performance deserves much credit for keeping viewers on his side even as the water climbs closer and closer to boiling. Going as grey, tired, and disheveled as he’s ever been on-screen, it is easy to see his Stephen as a pathetic figure. He fills his opening monologue about how little he cares about teaching now with hopeless resignation. He wanders about his empty home in his pajamas and his wife’s cardigan, buttoned around his notably larger frame. When he leaves the house, he wears it beneath his clothes and slathers on his son’s old cologne.

However, his increasingly hardened stare and venomous inner monologue give away the game. He’s a man “given” permission to act the monster. He starts driven but hesitant, unsure. In no time, though, he’s reveling in his “mission.” What he started as an obligation becomes a joy, and Kline lets us see every step.

Blanchett is equally good in what, in many ways, is the more challenging part. Besides being identified early as the series’ antagonist, she has to play things close to the vest and withdrawn. For the story to work, she can’t be too expressive—until she must. It’s easy to fade into the background playing such a part, but she lets the audience feel Catherine white-knuckling it. With every humiliation, every defeat, you can practically hear the teeth-grinding intensity keeping her in check.

In contrast to Kline’s wolf in sheep’s clothing performance, Blanchett is visibly incandescent with her feelings, but she can’t speak them. They don’t even peek through in her part of the voiceovers. Putting them in the third person and having it recited by Indira Varma is a subtly smart choice. It distances the viewers that much further from Catherine’s secrets.

There are times when Disclaimer feels a bit unstructured and in need of a tighter edit. The line between slow build and just too slow is a thin one. However, when the series reaches its climax, it becomes harder to say if it’s gone on too long. Would that moment hit as hard if we hadn’t spent so long living, as it were, with Stephen? If we hadn’t seen Catherine’s trials and tribulations in as much detail? I’d argue it probably still runs a bit long, but it feels more justified when the full picture becomes clear.

Disclaimer is not an easy watch. It will likely make one feel queasy at times and perhaps even a little disgusted. If not at oneself, certainly at some of the characters. From a show-making and acting standpoint, though, it is worth the investment, as uncomfortable as it may be.

Disclaimer writes the book on revenge on AppleTV+ beginning on October 11.

Disclaimer Trailer: