The Beauty review: Ryan Murphy's body horror thriller is stylish but surface-level

This review is based on the first two episodes of The Beauty.

Following 2025’s All’s Fair, the critically-panned legal drama starring Kim Kardashian, Ryan Murphy is back with another surface-level critique of social issues in his new series The Beauty, which takes loose aim at society’s obsession with physical perfection and the lengths people will go to achieve it.

The show, based on a 2015 comic book by Jeremy Haun and Jason A Hurley, is set in a dystopian world and follows FBI agents Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall), who’ve been sent to Paris to investigate a series of puzzling deaths that are connected by two strands: all of them are newly signed models, and they’ve all died by a mysterious and bizarre process of overheating and exploding.

What follows is a glossy, campy and satirical body horror thriller as their investigation soon leads them into the path of an organisation known as The Corporation, led by a tech billionaire (Ashton Kutcher), who has managed to engineer a beauty-enhancing drug.

Its label guarantees “One shot makes you hot”, and while it does fulfil its promise, there are a couple of unpleasant side effects: a painful mutation into the new conventionally attractive body, and, yeah, inevitable death.

Oh, and there’s another drawback: the injection has actually been engineered from an STD, which is also spreading among society.

It’s a wild and ironic premise that looks at the horrors of our obsession with physical attractiveness – the more attractive you are, the more dangerous you are to others who desire you – while the injection element engages with current discussions around Ozempic. Murphy leans into the un-seriousness of it all, and there are plenty of delightfully preposterous and entertaining moments.

Yet this approach also leaves the social commentary lacking depth and subtlety. Murphy’s sledgehammer approach is particularly evident in one clumsy discussion between Cooper and Jordan who are, funnily enough, sleeping together, in which Cooper bluntly points out that the reason behind people wanting to look good, and wanting to be attractive in the first place, always boils down to one thing: sex.

The Beauty is part of a growing trend of shows and films that are using body horror to visualise the internal consequences of external pressures such as health and beauty standards, from Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance to Alice Birch’s TV adaptation of David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers. Comparisons to The Substance, in which Demi Moore’s character reaches for a serum to transform her into the picture of youth that goes on to have side effects, in particular will be inevitable given the similarity of its premise.

But while the likes of The Substance and Dead Ringers offer in-depth explorations of their character’s psychological struggles (through extended and escalating body horror), The Beauty pales in comparison, offering only surface-level insight into the interiority of the characters – a woman wants to to be a model, for example, or an incel wants to sleep with women.

And while the first body horror transformation in the show is pretty wild and disturbing, once you’ve got the gist, it looks like the mutations are going to get quite predictable quite quickly (this is the case in the two episodes of the show that were available to review, anyway).

Instead the focus is on story momentum and plot, which is certainly intriguing, and looks to be ramping up at the end of episode 2 as Cooper finds The Corporation on his tail.

The series is also visually stunning – as fans will have come to expect from a Murphy production – and has a great cast. Hall and Peters in particular are terrific as sceptics of their image-obsessed society, while there are also some fun guest appearances from the likes of Bella Hadid.

The Beauty will premiere Thursday 22nd January on Disney+ in the UK.

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