Benny Safdie confirms The Curse’s ending was “always the ending”

There has been and will be a lot to say about the ending of The Curse. Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder’s 10-episode horror-comedy about the intersection of gentrification and reality TV seemingly tells you everything you need to know. Asher was cursed and, therefore, must be ejected from Earth. In a twist worthy of Shyamalan, his passive house sensed a new occupant (his baby) and did what it does best: Reduce unnecessary energy, e.g. Asher. It makes sense. Still, many remain flummoxed by the sudden and horrific burst of magical realism. “They just didn’t know how to end this thing,” says the strawman naysayer. Well, according to the show’s co-creator, co-writer, and co-star Benny Safdie, they started with the ending and worked backward.

“From the beginning, this was always the ending,” Safdie told the audience at last week’s screening of episode 10, rejecting any Monday morning show running that they didn’t know how to end this thing. When Film at Lincoln Center Assistant Programmer Maddie Whittle asked how he “reverse engineered” the show from that scene, Safdie, who spent much of the talk avoiding any specific readings of the episode, said, “Well, originally, he floats away but very slowly and then, practically speaking, we’re like ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be more exciting if it was reverse gravity and so then it was literally like falling off a cliff upwards.”

Safdie said that image is what they were chasing. However, it doesn’t exactly answer the question of why. Safdie, taking a page out of David Lynch’s playbook, decides to avoid spoiling the mystery and describe his intended effect of the happening.

I know there are a lot of questions about why it happened, and I imagine, why him? We have reasons, but it is very early in the gestation of all this, so the way I’d like to leave it is like, if you have a drawer, for example, and there was no handle on the drawer, how would you open it? Would you tip it forward, so that the drawer falls out? Would you use a knife to get into the crack and open it? Maybe you’ll take some tape and stick it to the front and pull it out that way. You’d come up with a lot of different ways to open that drawer, and what you’d find is the same information, but the way you got the information was your own. If you put a handle on the drawer, you just open it right up and find your information, so you lose a little bit of that process and that kind of searching, which I think is important for this.

I do think there is something strange in that. You will be watching something and asking, why did this happen? Why did this thing, which is clearly supernatural—why did this happen? How could it happen? It had to have been this, it had to have been that. You’re trying to find reasons for it, so it’s not too dissimilar to what it would be like if you were actually there. That was something that was important to us, which is when you’re faced with something like that, how would you respond?

[…]

I think in the process of trying to understand it, you understand more.

Safdie then proceeded to poll the audience on who believes in the supernatural, determined only five people did and then talked about how they pulled the episode off practically. He is right, though. Having an answer would certainly absolve us of Asher’s terror and diminish the show.

The whole talk is worth watching for fans of the show, its ending, and seeing Nathan Fielder on FaceTime. However, it seemed like less fun for Safdie, who described the Q&A as “like walking on landmines.”

Season one of The Curse is available to stream now on Paramount+.