The place is a secluded place, something called Oyster Bay, a suburb of seemingly isolated villas, villas like little universes, near New York. So far her most illustrious neighbor has been the writer Agatha Wiggs (beautiful, as always, Claire Danes), winner of the Pulitzer for a memory about his stormy relationship with his father, Sick Puppy.
But when the action of The beast in me (Netflix) begins, on the day that marks five years since the death of her son, little Cooper, in a terrible car accident – in which she was driving and in which she was simultaneously answering an interview – the son of a real estate tycoon, Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys in a role difficult to forget), a sort of star of the true crime. It has not been proven, but it is assumed that he could have killed his wife.
And what begins as gossip, something that Aggie Wiggs discusses with her publisher – worried because she is still in dry dock, she hasn’t delivered the chapters of what she is supposed to write for years – and with her ex, Shelley, a painter who has lived in the shadow of her success, ends up becoming a strange and dangerous game of mirrors. Because Nile seems to be obsessed with his new neighbor – he asks her to sign a copy of his book, he invites her to lunch to convince her to approve a ridiculous concrete path he wants to make in the woods to run -, who he treats as if he were an ally, because he believes that they are not so different after all. Aren’t they? Agatha didn’t kill anyone – and maybe not even Nile – but she wants to see the boy who was driving the car she crashed suffer the day her son died.
And here’s what’s special about it The beast in mewritten, among other things, by a novelist – and one given, until now, to humor and absurdity, Gabe Rotter – and produced, and this is always a guarantee of some kind of risk, by Jodie Foster. The symbiotic couple of Wiggs and Jarvis, Danes and Rhys, who shine astronomically in each of their moments alone – don’t miss a detail of the first time they eat together, or the night they get drunk at the writer’s house and end up listening to a certain Talking Heads song that is practically Nile’s character – with sinister chemistry. There is something, very much, of Patricia Highsmith in Rotter’s writings, which at one point even invokes the premise of strangers on a trainand continually plays with the darkness that, it is said, we all carry within us and which can end up taking possession of you.
The writer’s vampiric personality and her trauma – and her secret, because a secret exists – are a sort of grasp for the almighty Nile. Nile wants to have a friend. He wants not to feel alone. He knows some kind of monster and is dying to find someone who understands him. He wants to feel normal, to be like everyone else, but can he? Another such compelling success thriller —I promise you that once you start, you won’t be able to leave Aggie alone in that house, and there’s something gothic in that idea of the house as a refuge and at the same time as a threat, a labyrinth—it’s the sophistication of the construction of the two protagonists. Here are two narcissists, Rotter seems to tell us, each closed in their own bubble, where the bubble cannot be seen. Each of their gestures – how they give in, how they impose themselves, how they decide for the rest – is narrative gold.
What surrounds them is a plot that is perhaps too linear: Nile’s father, Martin (Jonathan Banks, the legendary Mike from breaking Bad), has a brother who will do anything to protect him and that includes not letting anything taint his legacy, who closes in on himself and where the interesting thing is the investigation that Aggie starts to try to write an essay about Jarvis that allows her, at the same time, to look inside herself. The scenes in which Wiggs writes are probably the closest television has come to portraying the life of a writer in recent times, if ever. The whole mystery is destined to disappear. Go inside. Being there without being there.
