Mind-Bending Finale of ‘The Curse’ Leaves Viewers Stunned

Among the privileged few who got to watch the entirety of The Curse back in November, what happens 28 minutes into the series’ final episode has been a secret more closely guarded than Taylor Swift’s Twitter password. The twist is so audacious you wouldn’t dream of spoiling it, and no one would believe you if you tried.

What happens is this: Several months after the end of the previous episode “Young Hearts,” Asher (Nathan Fielder) and Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone) are celebrating the release of their now-completed reality show, which has ditched the cumbersome title Fliplanthropy in favor of one focusing solely on Whitney, the titular green queen.

Their show seems to have landed with a thud—it’s only on HGTV’s streaming site, where not even their friends can figure out how to watch it—but they’re already formulating a second season, with a new addition to the cast. Whitney, who was forced to terminate an ectopic pregnancy early in The Curse, is now pregnant and close to giving birth.

And then, Asher wakes up one morning and finds himself on the ceiling. For reasons that never become clear, gravity has abruptly reversed itself, and he is, as he puts it, “falling up.” Initially, the couple assumes this highly specific inversion of the laws of physics must be an accidental byproduct of their specially constructed house—an air pocket, maybe?

What is going on here? How did The Curse go from an intriguing reality show about Asher and Whitney’s struggles to a mind-bending series where bodies suddenly shoot into the stratosphere? It’s as if Curb Your Enthusiasm used its final episode to morph into Twin Peaks. It’s hard to think of a show that has ended on such a deliberately oblique note—especially without giving any advance warning that it was going to. It might well be the most confounding finale in the history of television.

The Curse has not, up until this point, seemed like the kind of show where inexplicably bizarre things simply happen. Although the series’ inciting incident is the curse placed on Asher by a young girl selling sodas in a strip-mall parking lot, she later explains she was just following a TikTok trend, and the worst thing that happens is that Asher’s meal-prepped dinner arrives missing its protein. Nonetheless, the girl’s father warns, it’s not good to talk about curses.

There are a lot of ideas in The Curse, some realer than others. There’s Whitney’s dream of building environmentally sustainable housing, which tends to crumble anytime it’s forced to interact with reality. There’s the discrepancy between the versions of themselves that Whitney and Asher play for their reality show, directed by the amoral and desperately lonely Dougie (Benny Safdie), and the versions they present to each other.

Asher finally learns just how much Whitney despises him at the end of The Curse’s penultimate episode when Dougie shows them a section of their reality show focusing on how dissatisfied Whitney is with their marriage. Rather than see this as his cue to leave, Asher takes it as a call to action. He promises to become a different person from this moment forward. In a way, The Curse’s finale is simply Asher keeping his promise. It’s clear that, notwithstanding their modest good fortune, the Siegels are about to face something far more extraordinary.