The Beauty (2026) Review: Perfection as a Plague

Is The Beauty worth watching?

Mostly yes. The Beauty is a gorgeous, gruesome and hard-to-ignore body-horror satire, and it is at its best when it simply lets its outrageous premise run. A strong cast and immaculate styling make it consistently watchable. The reservation is its argument, which keeps slipping out of focus: the show is more interested in admiring its own surfaces than in saying anything sharp about the obsession with beauty it claims to skewer.

What is The Beauty about?

A mysterious new condition is spreading, and at first it looks like a miracle. Passed on through sex, it transforms the people who catch it into flawless, idealised versions of themselves. But perfection turns out to have a terrible cost, and as the beautiful begin to die in spectacular fashion, the authorities scramble to understand what is happening.

Evan Peters and Rebecca Hall play FBI agents tracking the outbreak, an investigation that takes them from the fashion runways of Paris into far stranger territory. Ashton Kutcher plays a billionaire tech figure who sees transcendence where others see a pandemic, and Isabella Rossellini, Anthony Ramos and Jeremy Pope round out the ensemble.

The Beauty is adapted from the comic book series of the same name and was created for television by Ryan Murphy and Matthew Hodgson. It is an American production in English, streaming on Hulu in the United States. This review covers the complete first season of 11 episodes, which tells a finished story.

Glossy surfaces, splattery payoffs

Visually, The Beauty is a feast. The fashion-world settings are shot with a magazine-cover sheen, and the contrast between those immaculate images and the grotesque consequences of the condition gives the show its most memorable moments. The body horror is inventive and unapologetically gory, delivered with a relish that fans of the genre will appreciate.

That tension between glamour and decay is the series’ best idea. Murphy has always been drawn to vanity, celebrity and excess, and here he finds a premise that literalises those themes in lurid fashion. When the show commits to its pulp instincts, it is gripping, funny and genuinely nasty.

A cast that sells the strangeness

Evan Peters and Rebecca Hall bring an unexpected gravity to the investigative strand, playing the absurdity straight and giving the show a procedural spine to hold on to. Their partnership adds a layer of weariness and humanity to a series that could otherwise feel like a parade of shock images.

Ashton Kutcher is a surprisingly effective choice as a tech messiah selling perfection, leaning into a smooth, persuasive menace that suits the show’s satirical side. Isabella Rossellini brings elegant authority to her scenes, and her presence adds a knowing wit to the show’s treatment of the fashion world and ageing.

The point keeps slipping away

Where The Beauty struggles is in knowing what it wants to say. It gestures at critiques of beauty standards, the wellness industry, tech-billionaire utopianism and public health, but it rarely develops any of them fully. Some episodes wander into subplots that feel indulgent, and the tone lurches between satire, melodrama and gross-out horror without always landing the transitions. Across 11 episodes, the lack of a sharp central thesis becomes more noticeable.

Who should watch The Beauty?

It suits fans of Ryan Murphy’s heightened style, body horror enthusiasts and viewers who enjoy satire with a strong visual identity. The season is a moderate commitment and is best watched in a few sittings to keep the momentum. Expect explicit gore, sexual content, disturbing imagery and themes of disease and bodily transformation; it is strictly for adults.

Worth watching alongside it:

• The Last of Us for an outbreak story that puts emotional depth ahead of shock value.
• The Audacity, a sharper satire of tech-industry arrogance, with less gore and more bite.

The verdict

The Beauty is a lurid, stylish and frequently entertaining horror satire with a strong cast and some unforgettable images. It works best when it stops admiring itself in the mirror and embraces its pulpy premise, and its muddled message keeps it from being more than a guilty pleasure with style.

Rating: 3.5/5