Netflix’s The Beast in Me Trailer Sees Claire Danes Embrace Her Dark Side
“The Beast in Me,” an 8-episode crime drama/thriller miniseries slated for release on Netflix on November 13, 2025, will clearly be predicated on the horror-genre adage that the most terrifying monsters lurk within our own souls. The premise of a murderer living next door is frightening enough. But Netflix’s “The Beast in Me,” the producers of which include Jodie Foster and Conan O’Brien as well as the starring Claire Danes, promises to have us asking who should frighten and appall us more: said murderer, or the tenacious writer who chooses to make herself a part of his life?
An Everyperson Hero, In Whom Darkness is Instantly Afoot
Claire Danes (“Romeo + Juliet,” “Homeland”) stars as a well-known author (true-crime author?) with the indelible name of Aggie Wiggs. As shown in the trailer, which Netflix dropped on October 16, Danes portrays Aggie as a very ordinary, albeit rather brooding, person who lives alone, is usually shown with a solemn expression, and has a troubled past that she describes as “a rough few years.” (In what is presumably a flashback, we see her throwing a brick through a store window).
Soon enough, she’ll have a rough present as well. The tension in the Netflix trailer sets in when we learn that Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys of “The Post” and “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood“), who is suspected of murdering his wife, moves into her neighborhood, whereupon she quickly considers making him the subject of her next book. “Did you kill her?” she asks him. “What do you think?” is his answer. “Whole world thinks they know what happened, but I didn’t kill my wife.”
Hoping to get to the bottom of his case, Aggie tells Nile that she “can offer a new narrative,” which could further his goal of being “relegitimized.” Soon enough, we see her (both in public and inside his home) getting together with him for drinks, and for an appreciation of his dimensions as a person. One half-jocular line from him – “I think we were having a moment” – even sends some sparks flying in her direction, and she doesn’t seem entirely averse to them.
While Nile’s status as a murderer may be very dubious, the people around Aggie find her new obsession with him increasingly unnerving. The remarks she receives progress from “Spending all that time with a possible murderer doesn’t scare you?” to “Hope you won’t be disappointed by the truth” to “You need help.” Nile himself tells her with relish: “You got bloodlust. I can smell it.” Worse is to come, however: FBI Agent Brian Abbot (David Lyons) knocks on her door one rainy night to warn her: “Be careful. Nile Jarvis… He’s not like us.”
An Appropriately Disorienting Latter Half
The best portion of this Netflix drama’s trailer commences after Agent Abbot’s announcement, when we face the mounting realization that Nile Jarvis is most likely guilty of his suspected crime. From then on, the trailer largely consists of a series of quickly cut clips. We can follow in broad strokes where the story and characters are going – thanks to such lines as Nile’s bitterly rueful pronouncement, “I trusted you a lot,” and Aggie’s own tremulous assertion, “Maybe I am complicit, but I’m not a monster” – but overall, these clips appear as disjointed as they are disturbing.
This approach sets just the right tone for “The Beast in Me,” because it reflects the ambiguous attitude towards Aggie Wiggs and her situation held by both the audience and Aggie herself. This attitude might best be described as a kind of turbulent miasma. Even as the trailer provides a fairly clear idea of the drama’s narrative progression, it leaves the viewer in the dark regarding precisely what she will do and what will be done to her towards the conclusion of this storyline.
Just as intense fear and guilt swirl together in Aggie’s psyche as she wonders whether she will be able to preserve both her life and her conscience – as she wonders, perhaps, what her complicity thus far says about the potential monstrousness that she denies – so we are left to wonder not only how she will make it to the end of the series, but what she must do to accomplish this. To paraphrase in a rather different context the tagline of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” the trailer for Netflix’s “The Beast in Me” leaves us to wonder: Will she survive, and what will be left of her?
