Two more horses in the crowded field of psychological thrillers have come out of the gate: “Malice,” now streaming from Prime Video, and “The Beast in Me,” on Netflix. Neither is especially surprising — “in their beginning is their end,” to switch up a line of Eliot — though they do provide some suspense and twists along the way. They aren’t trash; quite the opposite. Each plays out like a book that constantly tempts you to skip to the end to test your impressions, but they’re classy shows with fine performances and well-written scenes. Even in the extraordinary situations they portray, even when I didn’t buy a plot point or a development felt too convenient, I rarely felt that characters weren’t speaking as people do — or psychopaths, who are people too.
“The Beast in Me” is especially good, but it’s got Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, and there would have had to have been some serious malpractice behind the camera for it to be otherwise. Danes plays Aggie Wiggs, a writer of nonfiction whose marriage, to aspiring artist Shelley (Natalie Morales, a favorite of this department), fell apart after the death of their son in an automobile accident. She blames a local teenager for it, and is not quiet about her wishes for him. She’s supposedly working on a book about the unlikely friendship of judges Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, but writer’s block has run out the clock on advances, and bills are piling up.
Into her constricted life comes Nile Jarvis (Rhys), a wealthy New York property developer, who has moved in next door with his wife, Nina (Brittany Snow), and a couple of big scary dogs. Aggie wants his dogs to not run over and frighten her little, not scary dog; he wants her to join her neighbors in giving him an easement to build a jogging path behind their houses. There is violence in his past: Nile’s first wife, Madison, disappeared some years before, and he was suspected of her murder. Nile and Aggie get acquainted, and Aggie proposes she write his biography, which puts dollar signs in the eyes of her literary agent, Carol (Deirdre O’Connell).
Although it’s the right of every such story to make you change your mind about a character — even several times — my first reaction to Nile was, “Whatever was done, he did it.” Of course, I say this about pretty much every possible suspect in the course of a murder mystery, but I would have said this even before a man identifying himself as FBI agent Brian Abbott (David Lyons) knocked on Aggie’s door all discombobulated — in a storm, in the night — and warned her to watch out for him. And yet Danes, whose work has been shot through with an electric urgency since “My So-Called Life,” might appear to be the more problematic person; Aggie somehow seems to be shaking even when she isn’t. Nile is the cooler cucumber.
With his father, Martin (Jonathan Banks), one of those characters whose air of corrupt privilege makes it easy to mistake him for a crime boss, Nile is involved in a yet-to-break-ground development called the Jarvis Yards, opposed by council member Olivia Benitez (Aleyse Shannon). Any resemblance of these characters to Fred and Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is obviously just something in my head. Martin has a brother, Rick (Tim Guinee), who takes care of what needs to be taken care of, if you know what I mean. (Though in his way, he’s a pure soul.) Eventually we’ll meet Madison’s parents (Kate Burton and Bill Irwin) and brother (Will Brill), who do a lot with their brief scenes, and Hettienne Park as Erika Breton, another FBI agent.
It’s spoilers from there on out. That you’ll be less surprised than are the characters should not discourage you from watching.
“Malice” begins as Adam Healey (Jack Whitehall), a handsome Englishman, is being detained at U.S. Customs by the Department of Homeland Security; asked if he knows a person named Jamie Tanner, he replies that he worked for the family, and is shown a document that indicates something horrible has happened to or because of him. Since it’s clear from the title what sort of show this is, the mind goes to a number of reasonable suppositions, and though the particulars are saved for the finale, the generalities are made clear enough early on.
We are then transported back in time and space to a Greek island where Jamie (David Duchovny), a venture capitalist, is on holiday with his wife, Nat (Carice van Houten), their three kids and their kids’ nanny (Phoenix Jackson Mendoza). With them are another couple, Jules (Christine Adams) and Damien (Raza Jaffrey), who have brought their daughter and her tutor, who, as it not just so happens, is Adam, giving off Ripley vibes from the get-go. By the standards of television drama, Jamie, who likes to point out who’s paying for them all to be there, does seem like a pretty decent guy for a hard-hearted businessman.
The script, by James Wood (who co-created “Rev” with Tom Hollander), doesn’t bother to mask Adam’s nefariousness. Too charming and capable by half, full of facts (about Greek gods, the geological composition of the island), he’s a snoop, and a weirdo, and full of complicated plots. And he dances like a Greek native in a folkloric wedding scene, the sort of local-color diversion that added shine and reality to many a movie back in the 1970s. In a Tennessee Williams play, he might simply be a destabilizing force, a sex factor, among older, richer people, yet something darker is obviously happening here. Hanging up octopuses to dry on a clothesline, he tells the Tanners’ nanny, “Like to f— get you and hang out on a line.” But, as the action moves to London, he will merely replace her.
He does kill a cat. And there are snakes, for symbolism.
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