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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
19
Mixed:
10
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
The GuardianNov 13, 2025
Season 1 Review:
Even without two astonishing performances from the lead actors – Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys – the script, the sheer style and confidence of it all, would be things of beauty. But add what that pair are doing, and this clever, taut eight-part psychological thriller moves seamlessly into top-tier television.
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Nov 13, 2025
Nov 13, 2025
Season 1 Review:
When they’re onscreen together, as they are through much of this eight-episode Netflix series, they produce a palpable crackle of matching wits and complete commitment. “The Beast in Me” is hardly a two-hander; it boasts a strong supporting cast, and the assured tone of showrunner Howard Gordon (who co-created “Homeland,” the series for which Danes won two Emmys) and creator Gabe Rotter. But the fire comes from Danes and Rhys, who won his own Emmy for “The Americans.”
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RogerEbert.comNov 13, 2025
Season 1 Review:
Danes and Rhys do a bang-up job, no doubt, of bringing two incredibly damaged people to life in very different ways. But the series could have taken more risks in blurring the lines between good and evil; after all, few of us are all good or all bad all the time. ‘Tis a mere quibble; this November, set aside your second screens and your laundry basket to give thanks for this artistic bounty.
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Nov 13, 2025
Season 1 Review:
Danes’ work feels familiar (she can really cry on a dime, huh?), but she still makes Aggie’s tension and trauma feel new and lived-in. And Rhys is enigmatic as he gets lost in Nile’s thornier, more sociopathic side, with a jolting finale monologue that rivals the one he delivered in The Americans‘ sendoff. And anchored by those performances, The Beast In Me‘s snappy premise turns into an evocative and binge-worthy exploration of the human condition.
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Nov 14, 2025
Season 1 Review:
The idea that these characters would ever really be friends is helped along by the fact that Danes and Rhys are eating up these roles, reaching nuclear levels of mutually generated Gen X charisma in their scenes together. .... If the twists and turns come to seem a little bit predictable around Episode 5 of this eight-episode miniseries, at least you can always look forward to Aggie’s interplay with Rhys’ plain-spoken, forceful Nile.
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Nov 13, 2025
Season 1 Review:
By the middle of the season, I wished Rotter and Gordon would pare back the side stories to delve deeper into the psychology of the attraction and repulsion Aggie feels towards Nile. I wanted the show to give me more reason to be worried, as she is, that she really is a hateful person. But what isn’t on the page is there in Danes’ layered performance, and in Rhys’ and Snow’s and that of other key cast members, as characters bound together by self-deceit.
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Nov 13, 2025
Season 1 Review:
“The Beast in Me” crackles when it zeroes in on Aggie and Nile, either separately or together. .... When the show zooms out at the other moving pieces on the chess board meant to fill an eight-episode order, things get a little less interesting. .... But in the broader landscape of crime thrillers, this original story is well-deserving of a furious binge with performances that will have you yelling “Emmy!” at your television.
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Nov 13, 2025
Season 1 Review:
Too much talk can be fatal to a crime thriller, but the extended interplay between Aggie and Nile provides Ms. Danes and Mr. Rhys the room to create singular characters—neither very cuddly, but multifaceted and even recognizably human. .... The writing, by Mr. Rotter and others, and the direction, mostly by Antonio Campos (“The Staircase,” 2022), does enough narrative bobbing and weaving that we’re on the ropes for hours wondering who is guilty, innocent, complicit or treacherous.
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What's Alan Watching?Nov 13, 2025
Season 1 Review:
Despite all of this, Rhys is having so much fun, Danes makes such a good sparring partner for him, and the story moves at such a good clip prior to that ill-conceived flashback episode, that The Beast in Me is pretty engaging for most of its eight hours. It's an example of why tropes become tropes in the first place: because they work.
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The PlaylistNov 13, 2025
Season 1 Review:
The psychological character study, which seems, if not novel, at least imaginative by Netflix thriller conventions, is quickly supplanted by binge-worthy thrills. It makes the show easily digestible, but also quicker to fade. There’s a much more brutal, though perhaps less commercial, version of this story buried somewhere.
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Dec 10, 2025
Season 1 Review:
The series is twitching, but it’s not really alive. There is, in the end, a deadness to its clichés about writers and their subjects. It’s “The Journalist and the Murderer,” rotted with overplotting and kitsch. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love the show, or its pretensions to real storytelling, given how offensively rote some television has become. .... Ultimately, the series gives too much gravity to the writer-subject dialectic.
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Nov 13, 2025
Season 1 Review:
“The Beast in Me” is a mystery but it tips its hand early on some major points, and shifts into a mode of grinding, violent suspense; this switch fuels a feeling of indecision that hovers over the whole production. Danes manages to give a meticulous and intelligent performance throughout; Rhys, so good at playing principled men with violent depths in “The Americans” and “Perry Mason,” doesn’t find much beyond maniacal grins in the thinly conceived Jarvis.
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Nov 13, 2025
Season 1 Review:
Here is a series that fails to deliver anything even slightly surprising for nearly six full episodes, arrives at what appears to be an intriguing reversal of course, drains the momentum entirely with the flashback-driven penultimate episode, and then returns to the main story in a way that instantly defuses everything that could have been potent about the earlier cliffhanger.
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Radio TimesNov 13, 2025
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