The Beauty review: Ryan Murphys latest is gorgeous, unhinged ridiculousness
The Beauty is Ryan Murphy at his Ryan Murphy-est, which is to say that it's maximalist, deranged chaos.
For proof, look no further than the show's opening. Over five minutes, The Beauty puts Bella Hadid through body horror hell. As fictional model Ruby, Hadid struts a muddy Paris catwalk. She's gleaming — not with supermodel shine, mind you, but with a concerning layer of sweat. It's a symptom of a mysterious affliction that's burning her up from within, one so unbearable she begins snapping onlookers' necks in order to steal their water bottles.
That's just the start of Ruby's quest for hydration, which soon spirals into a motorcycle chase involving shredded skin, broken bones, and Hadid splashing herself with toilet water. It all culminates in Ruby self-destructing in an impressive shower of blood, guts, and gore that left me cackling and wondering, as I do after watching most Murphy shows, "What the hell did I just witness?"
What's The Beauty about?
FBI agents Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall) are trying to answer that very same question, albeit with far less cackling. Turns out, Ruby isn't the first supermodel to spontaneously combust. She's the latest in a string of grisly deaths, the culprit of which is a nightmarish new virus described as "the fucked-up love child of HIV and rabies, but neither."
Meet the Beauty, a sexually transmitted disease that turns its hosts into absolute bombshells — after a hideously painful transformation, that is. The virus was initially engineered as a product for the wealthiest man alive, known simply as the Corporation (Ashton Kutcher). While it's currently running rampant in the wild, he hopes to one day market it as the shot that makes you hot.
No, The Beauty is not (entirely) a Substance rip-off.
If the concept of an injectable beauty serum reminds you of Coralie Fargeat's 2024 film The Substance, I don't blame you. But The Beauty is actually based on Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley's graphic novel series of the same name, which began its run in 2015.
However, the show does take major liberties with its source material. (Hurley still serves as a consultant.) That includes the intense focus on the Corporation and the injectable aspect of the Beauty, which screams The Substance. It's tough not to see the latter's influence in The Beauty's many transformation sequences either.
These scenes are showstoppers: body convulsions straight out of The Exorcist, swaths of melting skin, and bone cracks so loud you'll think twice about watching any ASMR chiropractor videos. When a victim's "beautiful" self is ready to emerge, it does so by hatching from the goopiest cocoons you've ever seen.
After watching The Substance's Sue crawl out out Elisabeth's split back, these skin sac rebirths may feel tame by comparison. Plus, as The Beauty sees more and more of its characters transforming, the pattern of body horror risks becoming stale. Thankfully, the show's astounding prosthetics work, and the Beauty's increasing mutations keep things feeling fresh instead of punishingly rote. New transformations focus on new body parts, from teeth to fingernails to rib cages, ushering in a new wave of WTF-ery every episode.
The Beauty is at its best when it's unhinged.
Granted, "WTF" is the reaction so much of The Beauty wants you to have. The show oozes with twists, transformations, and out-of-pocket one-liners that feel, like the virus at the show's heart, as if they've been lab-engineered for maximum shock value. But Murphy and Hodgson also aim for introspection, trying to prompt greater conversations around beauty standards and the extreme lengths people go to in order to look "beautiful."
The latter elements are unfortunately skin-deep. As part of their thoroughly unconvincing love story, Detectives Madsen and Bennett discuss why people would want to take the Beauty in the first place, debating breast augmentation and monologuing about people's desire for sexual validation. Elsewhere, a plastic surgeon (Jon Jon Briones) tells a prospective patient (Jaquel Spivey) that he's an "incel" when he should be a "chad." Of course, the patient is extremely online and found the doctor thanks to a dark web chat room, meaning he'd definitely know what an incel is. This explanation is just one example of The Beauty's clumsy, on-the-nose attempts to be a part of current discourse around beauty standards. Of course, when the show itself caves to said beauty standards, with its cast of Instagram-perfect faces and bodies and a lens that ogles them incessantly, it's tough to believe that The Beauty buys what it's selling.
It's when The Beauty gets less earnest and more straight-up unhinged in its messaging that it works best. Forget metaphors about the Japanese art of kintsugi and embracing our physical flaws. I want the Corporation's Assassin (Anthony Ramos) ranting about the career of Christopher Cross on the way to a kill. I want Isabella Rossellini (whose casting is a delightful Death Becomes Her nod) reading Kutcher to filth for his superficial behavior. If you're going to somehow be less subtle than The Substance when it comes to commentary on beauty standards, I want you to make it flat-out fun!
The Beauty manages to do so as it begins to focus less on the detectives and their fight for justice, and more on the Corporation and just how darn evil he is. (It helps that both Kutcher and Ramos know exactly the kind of over-the-top villainy their roles demand.) There are some exceptions to the rule, though. At several points, The Beauty peers beyond both its detectives' investigations and the Corporation's wrongdoings, examining the many use cases for the Beauty beyond just looking stunning. Gender-affirming care and life-saving medicine are at the center of two of these moving storylines. The show also examines how the Beauty and social media make for a potent mix, especially for high school girls whose self-esteem already takes enough of a beating without the world telling them they need a hotness superdrug.
The ground-level storytelling in these vignettes is the closest the series has to holding up a mirror to our own world, no on-the-nose monologue necessary. Of course, it's not long before The Beauty reverts back to its main, extremely heightened plotline, full of jet-setting, corporate conspiracy, and yes, explosions. It's some of the most ridiculous TV I've watched in ages, and this being a Murphy show, you can bet I mean "ridiculous" in both the best and worst sense.