In the third and final installment of The Beauty’s three-episode premiere, we say hi to the bad guy. Antonio, the assassin employed by Ashton Kutcher’s mysterious rich guy to take care of problems, takes center stage this episode, and the show is all the better for it.
We catch up with our guy while he’s tormenting a victim-to-be, who he’s got hanging from the ceiling bound and gagged in his underwear while blasting “Easy Lover.” The stark white visuals, the use of an axe as the weapon of choice, and the ‘80s vibe are an homage to American Psycho, while the song choice calls back to a similar scene featuring spree killer Andrew Cunanan in co-creator Ryan Murphy’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.
I don’t mind these little swipes, certainly not the self-referential ones. Horror is a genre that exists in conversation with itself, as filmmakers scour the past to find what freaked people out and put their own spin on it. The best horror movies ever made do it! As long as you’re bringing something fresh to the table, it’s fair play.
Actor Anthony Ramos is the fresh ingredient here. His assassin character spends most of the episode in the international fashion destination…Indianapolis, where he tracks down both Jeremy, the incel who received an unauthorized, uh, dose of the beautification virus, and Dr. Dilgerge, the guy who gave it to him in order to save his own life. (You’ll recall Jeremy was in the middle of a killcrazy rampage at the time.)
Antonio kills the doctor, but spares Jeremy. At first he intends only to use the incel-turned-chad as bait to attract the poor woman he infected during a comically vigorous bout of sex. But then the assassin sees Jeremy’s killer instinct at work, as he singlehandedly beats the super-strong woman to death and saves Antonio’s life in the process.
Over riblets at Applebee’s — the one-eyed sophisticate may dislike Indianapolis, but he loves to eat good in the neighborhood — Antonio makes a proposal. He’s not playing some kind of mind game to prolong Jeremy’s agony. He sincerely wants the man to become his protégé. After all, Venice was a debacle: Agent Cooper Madsen killed two of the low-rent henchmen that Kutcher’s character gave Antonio as subcontractors, while the transformed Agent Jordan Bennett is MIA. Jeremy, who smiles like Jack Nicholson in The Shining when he realizes what’s up, seems like an ideal replacement.
But there’s more to Antonio than meets the eye. For starters, we only know his name because we overhear his half of a phonecall to his ex, to whom he provides child support with the money he makes as a hitman. His son is having some kind of struggle, but he wants to remain out of the kid’s life.
If, that is, he’s even a kid anymore to begin with. We learn that the fresh-faced, one-eyed assassin is 65 years old, just as Kutcher’s character is, in reality, the same age as his elegant senior-citizen wife, played by Isabella Rosellini. And she’s no fan of his! “Then it is official,” she tells him. “You are the biggest monster on the planet. Every night I pray for your death.” (No comment.)
Apparently these guys took a much purer version of the virus, one that doesn’t cause them to go crazy and then explode. It’s this exclusivity that Antonio is out to preserve by killing any and all unauthorized infected people. No wonder he’s so good at it: He’s got decades more experience than it looks.
The final surprise? Like his boss, Antonio loves him some yacht rock. In another American Psycho riff, he defends the artistic legacy of Christopher Cross at length, decrying the image-first MTV era for tanking the average-looking singer-songwriter’s career. “The world is cruel to people who aren’t beautiful,” says the murderer-for-hire.
But he only says this after he sings the entire first verse and chorus of Cross’s smash hit single, the definitive yacht rock song, “Sailing.” And I mean the whole thing, every note, for approximately one minute and forty seconds of screentime — all while Jeremy, who’s both a) not a fan of Christopher Cross, and b) convinced this man is going to kill him at any moment, watches in perplexed horror.
And dude, Anthony Ramos sings that song. He puts his heart and soul into it the way you do when you really want to kill it at karaoke. The funny, pop-culture-referencing hitman is an old archetype now — Pulp Fiction is over thirty years old — but rarely have I seen it done with this kind of cheerful gusto. Between this and his fine work on Marvel’s Ironheart, the guy plays a great villain precisely because he doesn’t really read as villainous.
The other thing worth noting about this episode is that Meghan Trainor gets thrown out the window of the Condé Nast cafeteria to her death, while Ben Platt contracts a fatal disease after a woman explodes and her blood gets in his eye. Their characters are so ghastly and superficial that within thirty seconds of meeting them you’re rooting for someone to spontaneously combust. Once his own blood tests come back clear of the virus, Cooper arrives on the scene to find the FBI is keeping dozens of exposed Condé staffers in a padded room in their underwear. It’s a very funny bit — sort of like Stuart Gordon’s The Devil Wears Prada.
So far, I’m thoroughly entertained by The Beauty. There’s something very New Lurid about it: the glitz and glamour, the decadent elites, the over-the-top gore and sexuality, the obsession with eternal life and family legacy. Its depiction of the FBI as elite crimefighters rather than the moronic footsoldiers of a dying pedophile may be out of date, but its assessment of the kinds of people who’ve appointed ourselves our rulers — status-obsessed sociopaths who see life as a game of them against the world in which the world must lose — seems spot on. And I really did like that Christopher Cross scene.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
