The Beauty has been one of the season’s most pleasantly unpleasant surprises — nasty, horny, catty, bloody, and beautifully disgusting. The production and costume design is first rate, referential of past horror/dystopian classics without feeling derivative. Ditto the body horror, which like that in The Substance is reminiscent of Cronenberg and Carpenter but blazes vile new snail trails of its own.
The show’s approach to its titular concept has been multifaceted and frequently fascinating. Fully acknowledging that beauty standards are draconian and arbitrary and designed to be profited from, the show also uses a variety of characters — a lonely shut-in, a depressed teenage girl, a trans woman, a sick child — to make the point that it’s not always shallow to want to look and feel like an idealized version of yourself. The question of “Whose ideal would that be, anyway?” is never far below the surface.
Plus it’s fun as all hell. Beautiful people running around bare-assed. Assassins and mutants and loose-cannon FBI agents (oh my!). Sci-fi lab facilities and pastel commercial parodies. Impeccable stunt casting. Mac Quayle’s creepy synth score. Frank sex talk. My favorite Ashton Kutcher performance ever. If the season had lasted just five seconds longer and shown us the new old Cooper instead of leaving us with a shrug of the shoulder I don’t think I’d have any substantive complaints at all. If they make a booster dose available in the form a second season, I’ll be first in line for a poke.
I reviewed the season finale of The Beauty for Decider. Fun show!
Tags: decider, horror, the beauty, TV, TV reviews