First impressions of The Beast In Me (Netflix) suggest Claire Danes has been wildly miscast as a grieving Pulitzer Prize author locked in a destructive game of mutual fascination with a villainous property developer. Danes is, after all, the go-to actor for edge-of-panic attack verisimilitude. All the way back to Romeo + Juliet (how terribly that “plus” sign has aged), she has brought a grounded quality to her roles – part of the reason Baz Luhrmann’s campy take on Shakespeare worked was because of the emotional weight Danes carried as a romantically tortured teen princess.
But she is up against it in The Beast In Me, a supersized serving of cornball escapism where she plays the preposterously monikered Aggie Wiggs. Angsty Aggie is a bestselling non-fiction author living in a fancy New Jersey neighbourhood and stewing in melancholy after the death of her son and the ensuing collapse of her marriage to Shelley (Natalie Morales). But her quiet, sad world is thoroughly shaken up when she embarks on a toxic game of mutual fascination with her creepy new neighbour, who may or may not have bumped off his first wife several years before.
It’s a meeting of opposites, both in terms of the characters but also in the energies brought by the perpetually histrionic Danes and by Matthew Rhys, who plays her villainous new acquaintance – real estate magnate Nile Jarvis. Danes spends her entire time looking as if she is choking back sobs – as a writer whose new project is a snooze-a-minute biography of the friendship between two US supreme court judges would.
But Rhys, by contrast, seems to have been told to behave as if he’s performing in a matinee panto at the Everyman Cork. Every line he delivers is belted out with comedic gusto. He all but twirls his invisible moustache and cane and winks villainously at the camera.
The Beast in Me review: Claire Danes thriller is hokier than Fair City but viewers will be hooked
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Adding to the hilarity is the fact that the Cardiff-born actor is attempting one of those “Brits-do-American” voices as made famous by Hugh Laurie in House. I’m not sure what it is about these accents that come off as inauthentic – but you know it when you hear it. Here is a linguistic uncanny valley that gains an extra level of ludicrousness courtesy of Rhys’s habit, as Nile, of wildly waggling his eyebrows.
It’s a perplexing watch in which prestige TV-style production values are paired with a script hokier than a Fair City double-bill. Still, the sheer guilty pleasure-ness of it all will keep viewers hooked as Nile begs Aggie to write a book about him while an FBI agent (David Lyons) warns her that he isn’t to be trusted. Meanwhile, Nile and his equally unpleasant father (Jonathan Banks from Better Call Saul) are trying to push through a real estate development despite opposition from an idealistic young politician (they’ve already bribed the less idealistic ones).
The Beast In Me is a crazy show that would fall apart immediately if anyone involved were less than 100 per cent committed. But the two leads go at it with bug-eyed enthusiasm – resulting in a thriller that is as exciting as it is out to lunch.
