Warning: This story contains major spoilers for The Curse finale.
We’re not even halfway through January, but The Curse might have just aired the weirdest TV finale you’ll see all year… or any year.
All season long, Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s series airing on Showtime and streaming on Paramount+ has been a master class in cringe storytelling — an unsettling, deeply bizarre tale about married couple Asher (Fielder) and Whitney (Emma Stone). The past nine episodes have followed the pair as they attempt to launch an HGTV home-flipping empire, filming the fictional show Flipanthrophy in the small New Mexico town of Española. What’s ensued has been a strange, often meandering saga, serving to skewer Asher, Whitney, and their particular brand of white savior cluelessness.
Despite the series’ explicitly supernatural title, The Curse hasn’t been all that paranormal. In the very first episode, Asher double crosses a young Somali girl named Nala (Hikmah Warsame) as she’s selling sodas in a parking lot, giving her a $100 bill only to snatch it back when the cameras stop rolling. As she stares him down, she lays a supposed curse on him, and as strange coincidences pile up, he starts to wonder whether Nala’s fake declaration might have very real consequences. Throughout the first nine episodes, The Curse remained ambiguously down to earth, never confirming Asher’s fears outright — at least not until the finale.
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Richard Foreman Jr./A24/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME
The final episode begins by jumping forward in time: After fertility struggles, Whitney is now heavily pregnant, and she and Asher have wrapped filming on their show. Now titled Green Queen — a title that firmly relegates Asher to the background — the show is airing not on HGTV but its little-seen streaming service, much to Whitney’s annoyance. Still, the pair get a coveted media hit, Zooming in for a virtual appearance on Rachael Ray’s daytime talk show. The beloved TV chef plays herself, showing off her culinary skills in front of a live studio audience and asking Whitney dutiful but bland questions about Green Queen. (Sopranos star Vincent Pastore also makes a guest appearance, serenading Rachael and sharing his personal meatball recipe.)
Once the TV cameras disappear, Asher and Whitney are left to reckon with impending parenthood. As a pre-birth gift to Whitney, Asher decides to gift the Questa Lane house to Nala’s father Abshir (Barkhad Abdi). The couple show up on Abshir’s doorstep to give him the good news, but instead of the TV-ready gratitude they expect, Abshir is far more realistic about the gift, mostly curious about who will pay the property taxes for the rest of the year.
Eventually, Asher and Whitney go home to sleep, and when they wake up, their world is upside-down — literally. As Whitney wakes up in bed, Asher wakes up on the ceiling. At first, he assumes that it’s something to do with their house (they did just install a pressurized, air-conditioned baby room), but he soon realizes that it’s something much stranger: Gravity has apparently reversed, and Asher is falling up.
What follows is about 40 minutes of Fielder scrambling about on the ceiling, bumping against skylights and becoming increasingly more panicked. Initially, the two approach Asher’s predicament with a stunning pragmatism — maybe she can throw him a towel and he can pull himself down? — but their fear rises as Whitney goes into labor. Eventually, their doula arrives to drive Whitney to the hospital, and as Asher attempts to escape the house, he winds up clinging to a tree branch.
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Richard Foreman Jr./A24/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME
The fire department arrive to try to bring Asher back down to earth, as their TV producer Dougie (Safdie) sets up video cameras to capture the mayhem. Both Dougie and the firefighters assume that Asher is just having pre-parenthood jitters, and all they need to do is cut down the branch — but when they do, Asher falls not down but upward, zooming straight into space.
It’s a strange, unsettling, and completely inexplicable ending: As Whitney gives birth to a healthy baby boy, Dougie sinks to his knees and begins sobbing, watching his friend float away like a loose helium balloon. All season long, The Curse has refused to answer whether its title hex was actually real, but the finale’s last scene seems to make it clear: Someone or something was clearly haunting Asher, to the point where he literally falls — floats? — to his inevitable death.
So, uh, what does it all mean? Good question! Throughout its 10 episodes, The Curse has juggled multiple genres, blending reality show parody, unflinching character study, condemnation of gentrification, and Fielder’s signature brand of cringe comedy. In its final moments, the show adds one final genre to the blender: otherworldly, almost Lynchian horror. In her early review, EW critic Kristen Baldwin described the finale as “truly bizarre,” the kind of baffling left turn that automatically invites Reddit theorizing and countless explainer posts (much like this one).
But although the show raises plenty of questions, it doesn’t seem all that interested in answering them. Instead, Fielder and Safdie seem far more interested in evoking an emotional response, letting audiences sit with the discomfort of watching Fielder try to infiltrate a casino or drift off into the stratosphere.
It’s worth noting that the pair have remained tight-lipped about whether The Curse will return for a second season or whether it’s a one-time miniseries, and Asher’s fate certainly seems to point to the latter. But regardless of whether The Curse returns or whether this is goodbye for Asher, Whitney, and Dougie, one thing’s for sure: This is a finale that literally leaves its characters’ fates up in the air.
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