When Good Neighbours Become Good Fiends:The Beast In Me.

"We have eyes at the front and sharpened teeth. We are predators. We fuck and we hunt and we kill and we shit and we like it. Every single one of us".

Aggie Wiggs (Claire Danes) is a reclusive author with writer's block whose son, Cooper (Leonard Gerome), died in a terrible traffic accident. She's separated from her ex-wife Shelley (Natalie Morales) and is working, or trying to work, on a follow up book to the one about her dad, Sick Puppy. The trouble is the book is about the lawyer and jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg and admirable though Ginsburg seems to have been it hardly sounds like a page turner.

So when the wealthy financier Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys) moves in next door and suggests that Aggie should write a book about him instead she eventually comes to realise that that would make for a much meatier follow-up - and might help her out in other ways too. Not that Nile Jarvis is a pleasant man. Quite the contrary. He's arrogant, he eats meat like a wild animal, and he orders other's meals for them at restaurants. Oh, and he's been accused of murdering his wife Maddy (Leila George).

But he's not been charged with anything. Maddy's body was never found. The battle between Aggie and Niles makes up the bulk of Netflix's The Beast In Me (created by Gabe Rotter, Howard Gordon credited as 'showrunner', Antonio Campos, Tyne Rafaeli, and Lila Neugebauer sharing directorial duties) and if it has echoes of 2023's Beef (also on Netflix) than that's hardly surprising. There's a lot of similarities though Beef is funnier and snappier and The Beast In Me aims for more gravitas, a more cerebral feel.

Which isn't entirely successful. Not least in the scenes that reminded me of 1990s erotic thrillers like Body Of Evidence or Basic Instinct (though don't waste your time looking for wank fodder here). Both Aggie and Niles, of course, have very nice, very big houses. She's won the Pulitzer Prize and has a little dog called Steve. Ex-wife Shelley is an artist (her paintings are actually pretty good) and she thinks Aggie needs professional help with a grief that is turning to bitterness. 

Not least in the way she deals with Teddy Fenig (Bubba Weiler) who was involved in the car crash that took Cooper's life and, Aggie strongly suspects, was drunk at the time. Somehow he escaped having a breathalyser test but it is her, not him, who has been issued with a restraining order and when he goes missing some fingers start pointing towards Aggie. Even though it's a case of suspected suicide.

Nile Jarvis may remind you of a certain president. Not just his arrogance, his constant, and barely suppressed, aggression, his self-obsession, and his constant grandstanding. He's made his fortune in Manhattan real estate, he has a much younger wife in Nina (Brittany Snow), he had an older brother that died young due to addiction issues, he holds women in contempt, and his father (Jonathan Banks, Mike Ehrmantraut in Breaking Bad) is an egotistical and ultra-competitive shitbag of the highest order.

But if Nile is some kind of cipher for the tangerine tyrant then what is Aggie? It seems to me she's an archetype of the so called liberal/metropolitan elite. Out of touch, sometimes snobby, easily angered, and never questioning her own beliefs even when they are clearly formed out of personal prejudices. She is ridiculously wealthy and privileged in her life but she is seemingly unaware of that fact. You'll have met someone like her.

Despite this, we can't help rooting for her as Nile's involvement in her life seems to bring all manner of jeopardy and danger. It starts innocently enough with Nile hiring a construction company to build a jogging track in some nearby woods, Nile and Nina's noisy alarm keeping Aggie awake at night, or their even noisier, and more threatening looking, dogs doing much the same.

When Aggie gets a visit from drunk FBI agent Brian Abbott (David Lyons) in the middle of the night she starts to realise that this story, the one she's about to write about, goes far deeper and that, it seems, is the main problem with The Beast In Me. Because it's Netflix they have too many episodes. Eight, all nearly an hour long. It starts well and it ends well but there's a lot of flab in the middle.

Some of the supposedly tense scenes are not as tense as they should be (though there's an absolute chill up the back jump scare that arrives in a "the call is coming from inside the house" fashion) and some of the acting (specifically that of Rhys) is hammy as fuck. Seemingly intentionally so.

It all comes good in the end though so it's worth hanging on through the longueurs to get there. There are riots, extreme drunken behaviour, bad actors with very precise agendas, knives, elephants at parties, hyperrealism, weaponised canines, property porn, a glut of nosebag (even some cartel members), bloodied bandages, close ups of human mouths, hacking, and pistol whipping and there are decent supporting performances from the likes of Tim Guinee (as Nile's uncle Rick who sometimes goes under the name Wrecking Ball), Aleyse Shannon (Olivia Benitez, a councillor who is campaigning against one of Nile's real estate projects), Deirdre O'Connell (as Carol, Aggie's agent, friend, and confidante - useful for exposition), and Hettienne Park as Erika, another FBI agent who just happens to be having an affair with Brian Abbott.

There's some decent music (Wings' Let 'Em In, Talking Heads, Pixies, Bowie, and Karl Denver's Wimoweh) and there's an impending sense, nearly all the way through, that something really bad is about to happen. Everyone is suspicious of everyone else nearly all the time. The rich person's world looks to be one full of paranoia and double crossing as much as it is one of expensive meals and luxurious homes. 

The Beast In Me doesn't quite work as a whodunnit and it doesn't quite work as a satire on the excesses of the megarich but despite all that it is, after a fashion, a very enjoyable watch which is best taken as a good old fashioned thriller. I'm not sure that's what the makers intended but it's what they've delivered and that's good enough. But then I liked Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin in Sea of Love.