The streaming TV era has granted great actors plentiful opportunities to star in melodramatic hokum, and in the case of The Beast in Me, it’s Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys who are the beneficiaries of this new world order.
An original tale that nonetheless feels like it must have been adapted from an airport paperback novel, Howard Gordon’s eight-part Netflix show, premiering Nov. 13, is an expertly performed and assuredly directed saga about storytelling, self-delusion, and murder that never stops playing familiar narrative games and indulging in overwrought exposition. Overcooked and non-nutritious, it’s a series fit to be consumed and then promptly forgotten.
The most striking aspect of The Beast in Me is that it’s shot and edited with an honest-to-goodness cinematic eye courtesy of Antonio Campos (The Devil All the Time, The Staircase), who shrouds his characters in luxuriously portentous shadows and spies them from unnerving off-kilter angles.
Compared to its television brethren, the series boasts a prestige big-screen sheen, and contributing to its proficiency are Danes and Rhys, the former as Agatha “Aggie” Wiggs, an author who won the Pulitzer for her debut novel (about her unpleasant dad) and is now mired in a four-years-and-counting funk.
The reason for her writer’s block is a car accident that claimed the life of her young son Cooper (Leonard Gerome) and, afterwards, destroyed her marriage to artist Shelley (Natalie Morales). Now living alone with her pup Steve in a stately Long Island house, plagued by PTSD and incapable of doing anything with her follow-up—a non-fiction tome about Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia’s atypical friendship—she’s an angry, bitter recluse.
Aggie’s hermit-like existence is disrupted by the appearance of scary dogs at her window that, she learns, belong to Nile Jarvis (Rhys), a real-estate tycoon who’s infamous for being suspected of slaying his still-missing wife Madison. Having moved in next door, Nile’s first order of business is trying to convince his neighbors to let him build a jogging path in the woods behind their residences, and when Aggie refuses to give her permission—and rejects Nile and wife Nina’s (Brittany Snow) housewarming gift—she catches his eye.
A fan of Aggie’s work and surprised by her vehemence, the cocky and brusque Nile attempts to sway her over lunch in town. During that meal, Nile’s violent response to a diner taking a photo of him—he smashes the stranger’s phone—startles and subtly impresses Aggie. Afterwards on the street, he’s intrigued by Aggie’s still-raging fury at Teddy Fenig (Bubba Weiler), the young man she holds responsible for the crash that killed her son.
(Warning: Some spoilers follow.)
Later that night, Aggie is visited by drunken FBI agent Brian Abbott (David Lyons), who warns her to stay away from Nile. The following morning, Aggie is shocked to hear that Teddy has gone missing and all signs point to death by suicide. She instantly comes to suspect that Nile—who noticed in her the same “bloodlust” that drives him—has offed him on her behalf.
In response, she convinces Nile (who first suggested the idea) to let her write a book about him, and he agrees, this despite the fact that his uncle Rick (Tim Guinee), who acts as his bodyguard and security chief, thinks it’s a bad idea, as does Nile’s father Martin (Jonathan Banks). Nile has moved to the suburbs to avoid the scrutiny that’s plagued him since his first spouse’s disappearance, and he’s now in a battle against progressive NYC councilwoman Olivia Benitez (Aleyse Shannon) over his enormous Jarvis Yards construction project. To his power-player relatives, partnering with Aggie appears to have no appreciable upside.
They’re correct, and yet Nile goes ahead with it because he’s the most arrogant man who ever lived, and Rhys, his eyes alight with menacing entitlement and confidence, makes him an entertainingly unlikable cretin. Per its title, The Beast in Me is rooted in Aggie and Nile’s similarities: their hunger for vengeance; their persecution and isolation; and their habits of telling themselves stories to assuage their guilt over the roles they’ve played in their lives’ tragedies.
If this weren’t clear from the action at hand, Gordon’s series spells it out at intermittent intervals courtesy of Aggie reading narrated passages from her in-progress book, as well as dialogue that leaves no theme unspoken. At the same time, it adheres to a conventional dramatic structure, with Aggie initially suspecting Nile of homicide, then doubting herself due to complicating evidence uncovered during her investigation, and finally grappling with wannabe-staggering revelations.
While The Beast in Me isn’t a particularly canny creature, its aesthetics are edgy and its symbolism (such as Aggie’s house’s pipes spewing rancid liquid) is restrained, and Danes and Rhys are captivating as likeminded souls engaged in a cat-and-mouse contest. As is her trademark, Danes’ lips are in a near-constant state of quivering, and her weepiness, however relevant, can be tiresome.
The majority of the show’s supporting players are prevented by the straightforward material from being more than adequate, although Rhys has fun as the playfully devious Nile, who takes pleasure in teasing his guilt one moment and proclaiming his innocence the next. He’s the main draw of this by-the-books mystery, and his ability to cloak Nile’s true nature until the closing chapters helps offset the plot’s sillier and more obvious developments.
The Beast in Me is padded with extraneous subplots that cause the show to mosey rather than suspensefully move, and the answers to its questions are, in the end, pretty mundane. Worse, despite its protagonist’s fourth-episode monologue about Freud’s theory of “the death instinct” (known as “Thanatos”), Nile and Aggie’s primal bond feels more like a carefully constructed conceit than a living, breathing reality.
Then again, the same can be said about much of this venture, whose characters are by and large stock types and whose manipulations are creaky and only moderately rewarding. For a series that purports to be about the wildness residing inside all of us, it ultimately proves far too tame.
