Renovation dreams meet something stranger than bad luck in The Curse, Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder's 2023 comedy about a couple building an eco-friendly HGTV show while quietly unraveling.
What is The Curse about?
Asher and Whitney Siegel are newlyweds and TV hosts, filming a home-renovation series meant to showcase sustainable, community-minded housing in a small New Mexico town. The cameras capture their marriage at its most polished — but off-camera, an unsettling incident involving a young girl leaves Asher convinced he has been cursed, and the anxiety starts bleeding into every corner of the couple's professional and personal life. Their producer, played by Benny Safdie, keeps pushing the show forward regardless of what's actually happening to the people fronting it, and the series draws its uneasy comedy from the gap between the tidy story being filmed and the far messier one unfolding around it. Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder lead as Whitney and Asher, playing two people trying to conceive a child while their careers and marriage quietly come apart.
About the cast
Emma Stone plays Whitney with a mix of ambition and self-delusion that keeps the character sympathetic even at her most controlling, while Nathan Fielder brings his familiar deadpan discomfort to Asher, a man convinced disaster is closing in on him. Benny Safdie, who also co-created and directs episodes, plays the couple's producer as an operator who treats their unraveling marriage as usable footage.
Context & significance
The Curse comes from the creative pairing of Nathan Fielder, known for pushing comedy into deeply uncomfortable territory, and Benny Safdie, whose filmmaking with his brother has centered anxious, spiraling characters. Together they built a show that satirizes both reality-TV house-flipping and the performative goodwill of eco-conscious branding, using a fixed, static camera style that makes even ordinary scenes feel quietly off. It earned strong critical notice for how far it pushes cringe comedy toward genuine dread.
Watching The Curse on Ktime
The Curse is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, letting Farsi-speaking audiences follow Asher and Whitney's unraveling in their own language. Watching only requires a free K-Time account login — no separate purchase — and the platform's Farsi-first design is built for Iranian diaspora viewers who want English-language prestige comedy without losing anything in translation.