The Beast In Me

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.

It's a deeply appreciated bonus that The Beast in Me happens to be excellent: genuinely suspenseful, surprising enough to overcome any murder show tropes that occasionally creep into the narrative, and, obviously, well acted, not only by Rhys and Danes.

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.”

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.

This is a cerebral thriller of the highest order, and that’s reflected in the writing, acting — Danes, Rhys and Snow are all deserving of accolades — and the direction.

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.

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.

“The Beast in Me” is especially good, but it’s got Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, and there would have had to have been some serious malpractice behind the camera for it to be otherwise.

The Beast In Me benefits from a focused story that puts its Emmy-winning leads in a good position to do their best work, especially when they’re on screen together.

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.

“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.

The Beast in Me is a series that underscores how a well-paced and tightly written story can keep us invested.

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.

With each revelation that's made, including one shocking discovery that Brian makes in the third act, the series becomes more of a nail-biter.

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.

While the show feints in the direction of Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer,” it never seriously interrogates the way authors can betray their subjects. Still, it’s a very entertaining watch.

Some questionable storytelling choices and uneven execution make it an at times frustrating watch. It's not the next Homeland, but it's worth your time if your looking for a thriller to devour over a rainy weekend.

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.

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.

Rooting “The Beast in Me” in Aggie’s perspective means that, while the series is absorbingly paced and makes full use of the lead actors’ talents, it’s also lopsided as a character study.

Some viewers who start this will find themselves sufficiently invested to see it through to the end. But there will certainly be others – like me – who think The Beast In Me should have been put out of its misery long before it made it to Netflix.

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.

The muddied narrative does its job in pitting Danes and Rhys together in scene after scene, but it also keeps the show from being as vicious as it should be, leaving them to make up the difference.

“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.

It just doesn't go quite right enough to live up to the talent and credentials of its two leads. And no matter how strong your actors are, it doesn't make up for weak scripts surrounding them.

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.

It's the kind of daft assembly line thriller that you'd normally expect to see fired out of Netflix's Harlan Coben machine, or perhaps aired across three consecutive nights on 5; but the money and star-power behind this one does give it a certain charm.