Claire Danes is wonderful depicting her character Aggie's rebirth as a writer.Courtesy of Netflix/Netflix
In the new Netflix thriller The Beast in Me, Claire Danes uses all her emotive powers to deliver a pair of formidable performances.
Those well-deep eyes, that face that can quickly contort into Munch-like anguish - Danes deploys them to often wrenching and always riveting effect playing both cat and mouse over the eight hours of the limited series.
It’s too bad, then, that the two performances she gives never really cohere into a single consistent character.
Aggie Wiggs, the one and only person she plays in the show, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning memoirist, introduced moodily inhabiting a gloomy house on Long Island.
Her young son, Cooper, died in a car crash years earlier; her artist wife, Shelley (Natalie Morales), left her; and she now lives on her own with a three-book deal that she’s approximately zero books into delivering on.
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The writer’s grief long ago curdled into rage at a young man named Teddy who was driving the other vehicle in the accident that ended her son’s life.
Aggie is backed up just like her home’s plumbing - which frequently sprays her in the face with brown guck.
But then finally something happens to unclog her pipes: Nile Jarvis moves into the mansion next door.
Nile, played with trollish charm by Matthew Rhys of The Americans, is a Manhattan real-estate mogul whose wife went missing six years earlier. Most people strongly suspect he murdered her; he behaves in a manner that does little to that dispel that impression.
In the fantastic first episode of The Beast in Me, Aggie turns her anger toward Nile after he introduces himself in an infuriating legal letter, requesting that she sign on the dotted line to allow him to put in a running path through the woods behind her house.
Rebuffed, Nile twists Aggie’s arm into having lunch with him - and that’s when her fury starts to morph into fascination.
Matthew Rhys and Brittany Snow in 'The Beast in Me.'Chris Saunders/Netflix
Danes is wonderful depicting Aggie’s rebirth as a writer over this meal - her repulsion turning to attraction as she reimagines the entitled Nile into a muse who, if not a murderer, certainly seems capable of being one. We watch her professional interest pushing away her personal trauma for the first time in years.
So long to the book Aggie’s been working on about the unlikely friendship between Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia.
Hello to a new one that will chronicle her own unlikely friendship with Nile - and perhaps discover if he did it.
This is a strong premise for a psychological thriller - and the directors of the series, starting with Antonio Campos, artily play up Aggie as a kind of mirror image to Nile, her reflected face, for instance, bleeding into a picture of his on her laptop screen.
At one point, Carol - Aggie’s literary agent, in a well-carved cameo by Deirdre O’Connell - describes what her client is working on as In Cold Blood meets The Year of Magical Thinking.
Unfortunately, The Beast in Me introduces a second potential murder to the plot in the second episode that diverts Danes aways from her up-to-that-point brittle but brainy portrayal of Aggie as a cross between Truman Capote and Joan Didion.
Soon after Nile and Aggie have their initial lunch, Teddy disappears, leaving a suicide note just as Nile’s wife did years earlier.
Aggie becomes convinced that Nile has had him killed on her behalf - and panics.
Matthew Rhys plays his character Nile Jarvis with trollish charm.Chris Saunders/Netflix
The Beast in Me now requires that she alternate between being the calm, crafty writer enticing Nile to reveal who he really is to her in interviews - and being a scurrying, skittish heroine of a more pulpy thriller while trying to dig up evidence against him.
The second Aggie teams up with a disreputable FBI agent named Brian Abbott (a lugubrious David Lyons) to investigate in a reckless manner. Every time she picks up the phone to text Abbott sensitive information, her credibility as the other, whip-smart Aggie falls apart.
The idea that Nile would impulsively kill for Aggie never really tracks as anything other than, perhaps, a response to an insufficiently imaginative Netflix executive’s note to “raise the stakes.”
It’s a shame that the series doesn’t quite add up, because in the less pulpy strain of the show, Danes is capable of making Aggie’s wrestling match with her darker, more beastly side much more thrilling than any hackneyed chase scene of a potential psychopath through a construction site could ever be.
The Beast in Me is now available on Netflix.