Clare Danes is, without doubt, the absolute boss when it comes to playing broken women. And here she is again in The Beast Inside Me, a modern noir tale, playing celebrated, Pulitzer-prize-winning author Aggie Wiggs, living in a remote hamlet on Long Island, New York.
From the opening frames, the series makes absolutely sure we understand Aggie’s frayed mental state. You know she’s struggling and on edge because everything is making her jumpy and nervous, and we’re given not-so-subtle visual metaphors to strengthen this character: her drains aren’t in good shape, so brown ooze belches from the plugholes, and some meaty-looking dogs are barking and frothing at the back door. Existential threats everywhere.
Those dogs belong to her new neighbour, multi-millionaire property developer Niles Jarvis (Matthew Rhys) – a sharp, to-the-point sociopath with a smile like a scalpel. He wants to build a joggers’ path around the hamlet, and Aggie is the lone holdout. Her resistance fascinates him. He sees her as a challenge and is a self-professed fan of her book. Through persistence, very smart dialogue, she finally agrees to lunch. But before we go any further, the show makes sure we understand two crucial pieces of baggage these characters drag everywhere:
Niles Jarvis was accused of murdering his wife, Maddie, whose body has never been found.
Aggie’s young adopted son was killed in a car smash aged eight, while the young lad who ploughed into their car walked away Scott-free.
What follows is a slow-burning psychological fencing match. Aggie is fully aware of Jarvis’s grim past, but something about him intrigues her; he knows this and circles her accordingly. Every sentence that comes out of his mouth is loaded and designed to manipulate, belittle, and control Aggie. He keeps banging on about blood lust and is convinced that everyone is capable of evil. It’s inside everyone, including his new neighbour.
Aggie’s own raw desire for justice – for the young man who killed her son – becomes a pressure point. When she admits she wants him to get justice and ruminates on rage and vengeance, Jarvis nods… and sure enough, the young man vanishes the next day.
This disturbing binding of their fates leads Aggie to make a terrible, irresistible decision: she agrees to write Jarvis’s autobiography. The setup has an In Cold Blood flavour – intellectual fascination laced with moral rot. But why not? Jarvis has never been convicted, and this would be about as big a scoop as there possibly could.
The show toys with us expertly: Is he actually a murderer, or simply the world’s most charming sociopath? By the middle of episode four, we’re still not sure… but then an action by Jarvis reveals all, and there is no doubt as to who he is.
And that reveal is where The Beast Inside Me stumbles. What begins as an intimate, nerve-tightening, cat-and-mouse two-hander – Danes and Rhys are in top, top form – starts to devolve. This is a bit of a disappointment to be honest, because the show turns far pulpier and schlockier, far more generic and, at times, brutal. Before long, we’re knee-deep in shady property investment schemes, political machinations, corrupt FBI agents, and Jarvis’s clan (including his domineering father and new wife Nina). The intimacy and psychological precision of the early episodes has become diluted by plot machinery that feels imported from a different, less ambitious thriller.
That said, even when the show wobbles, it never becomes dull. Yes, there are some decent twists, and it is a fun and propulsive thriller, all the while hanging onto this question of whether psychopathy is already inside us or is cultivated.
The Beast Inside Me‘s second half doesn’t to its first – moody, unsettling, and anchored by two actors who know exactly how to make darkness seductive. Worth a binge.
Paul Hirons
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
The Beast Inside Me is broadcast in the UK by Netflix