In the Flesh: Sexy Beast Season One

I’m so incredibly pleased to have been proven wrong so many times in the past year. I try to go into every movie and TV show ready to be surprised and delighted, open to the possibility of joy, but living up to Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast is an order tall enough that I felt pretty bearish on the prospect when I first heard it was in process. And then, an embarrassment of riches. Tamsin Grieg giving the performance of a lifetime as Don Logan’s (Emun Elliott) monstrous sister, Cecilia. Stephen Moyer playing a social vampire a thousand times more terrifying than the real one that made him famous. James McArdle channeling a young Gandolfini as safecracker and master thief Gal Dove, the kind of man people like, the kind they want to be around, Sarah Greene as a porn star with a spine of steel and barbed wire wrapped around her heart (if you can watch her break her shitty director’s face with a paddle after he harangues the talent one time too many without your pulse jumping double digits, you’re a reptile), just a feast, man. A feast. You end every episode sucking the taste from your fingers.

And Don. Don. Emun Elliott is a broken speak-n’-spell ranting and raving and yearning, palpably yearning, for any kind of love and stability, any kind of routine. He’s a broken little boy being pushed and pulled and beaten like a dog, and all the while you’re thinking of Ben Kingsley’s iconic role in the original film, the way his friends recoil from him in terror, won’t meet his eyes, and you keep wondering, what did he finally do? What snapped, to make this man’s tough, capable Eastender friends react to his mere presence like he’s the Witch-King of Angmar? It ratchets the show’s already considerable tension up to unendurable levels. Something bad is going to happen, and it’s going to happen soon. Every new disaster that strikes without tipping exactly what that dark thing barreling down the train tunnel toward us only raises the stakes. And his voice, man. That childish, nasal squeak, confused and irritable. It’s a performance and a portrayal which both enrich the original film, texturing Don’s character with childhood sexual violence, with incestuous overtones, with needs and goals and desires both pitiable and relatable.

And the colors, man. The opalescent whites and deep, lucid blues. The rich, reflective varnished oak and faded gold. Cinematographers Birgit Dierkin, Ralph Kaechele, and Mattias Nyberg have absolutely got the goods. The lighting is some of the most thoughtful I’ve seen in years, the textures it imparts to skin, the things the show does with shadow in even its most throwaway shots, this is real artwork. People cared enough to make it beautiful for us. Then there’s Nathan Micay’s work as music supervisor, an effortless blending of all-timers like The Flamingos’ ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ and Snap!’s ‘Rhythm Is a Dancer’ and deep cuts like Dominator’s ‘Human Resources’ into a wall of sound that immerses you not just in the show’s early 90s setting but in its recent past. It’s music as people listen to it, and it’s deployed so thoughtfully, not through the kind of one-to-one matching you see on Stranger Things or in the disastrously flat needle drops of the most recent season of Yellowjackets. Expertly constructed on every level, Sexy Beast is a grimy, sleazy, sweaty delight.