“Couples fight–it’s normal,” Carey Mulligan’s Lindsay says to her husband, Joshua, played by Oscar Isaac in the premiere episode of the sophomore season of Netflix’s Beef. “We’re normal,” she adds. Her brow is slightly furrowed as if she is trying to convince both of them of this statement. A fight is yet again at the center of Lee Sung Jin’s series about suppressed rage, released rage, and how we react to the sudden deluge of emotions that we aren’t prepared for. If season one was an anguished scream, its successor is a strangled sigh: a tragic acknowledgement of how you sacrifice a part of yourself in the pursuit of a perfect union and how the expectations of true partnership can break your heart. It’s raw and guaranteed to get a rise out of you.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of rage to be discovered in the second season of Beef, and that’s found within the premiere’s opening sequence. After a fruitful night at a benefit for a posh country club, Monte Vista Point, Josh, the general manager, and Lindsay trade barbs as they pour themselves another cocktail. The renovations on their house have taken too much time, Lindsay thinks, and they aren’t where they thought they were when they turned forty. Joshua feels attacked by all of his wife’s passive aggressive comments, and she explains that she has only gotten good at pretending that she likes sitting on committees and charities. This is not the type of fight that has never happened before. It’s the kind that rolls over and mutates and spikes back up again.
When Ashley and Austin (Cailee Spaeney and Charles Melton), underlings at Monte Vista, find Joshua’s wallet and decide to deliver it personally, they stumble upon the crescendo of the fight. By this moment, Lindsay and Joshua have laid their hands on each other’s belongings, and they are snatching them back from one another–a golf club is in his raised hand and her screams get higher and and more desperate. The volume of their shouting convinces Ashley to take out her phone and record before they are spotted and they run away. That recording of a near-violence serves as the catalyst of what is to follow across Beef’s eight tightly-wound episodes.
Ashley and Austin are engaged to be married, and they say ‘I love you’ so often that a drinking game dedicated to the phrase would have you in a coma by the end of episode two. They aren’t meant to be naive but innocent–inexperienced. When they are driving onto Joshua and Lindsay’s property, Austin comments that the expansive grounds are “like Rome” before Ashley adds, “rich people are so gross.” Even the mustache above Austin’s upper lip might be his first foray into facial hair.
Beef positions the differences of these couples at the center of the thrust of the season. To Ashley and Austin, their manager and his wife are old and too privileged. To Lindsay and Joshua, their employees might seem not just gullible but simple in some respects. The subsequent discussions about what transpired that night grants Ashley a promotion at Monte Vista as long as she and Austin delete the video off of her phone. Austin then becomes a physical therapist on staff, and Beef begins to explore how those in power lift up their friends and those they owe favors to.
Joshua is feeling pressured to keep his head above water when a new owner, Chairwoman Park, arrives on the scene. She insults Lindsay by dismissing her interior design and requesting it to be entirely redone without her “colonial” touch, and, at the start of the season, you are not aware of how much power Park wields in this world. The first image we see of the season is a line of ants being crushed under someone’s foot, and that visual metaphor is carried through. When Austin spies a bee stuggling on the floor of their apartment, he tells Ashley on the phone later that he cried when it died.
The fight in question isn’t just between two people but four participants, and this season uses that to analyze our expectations of marriage and relationships. Lindsay and Joshua squabble frequently, and Austin and Ashley never imagine that their upcoming marriage will ever end up like theirs. Beef shows, though, that the little things, can snowball even though you don’t know the weather is changing. After Ashley takes her new job at the club, she walks in several times to Austin slacking on making the workout videos that he hope will become bigger and bring in more clients. When things become one-sided between them, those little annoyances begin to creep in. On the flip side, there is a lot of affection between Isaac and Mulligan even if they are at each other’s throats one minute and understanding the next. Even Park is using her wealth to protect her surgeon husband, played by Song Kang-ho, after an accident in Korea leaves a patient dead on the table. She is trying to prove to herself that she made the right moves in her marriage to him, but she has enough influence to make that happen for as long as she can. In a lot of ways, each couple, perhaps unconsciously, wants or could learn from the other marriages right in front of them.
There is so much for these actors to sink their teeth into. Mulligan gives Lindsay a searing vulnerability when it comes to aging and how she looks. When she is alone, she switches between considering flirting with the new tennis coach (played by rapper BM) and looking up headlines about a former flame as she considers traveling to Korea for some work on her face. There are a few moments where Lindsay looks in the mirror and sees a younger version of herself that she will never be able to attain again. Joshua is drowning in debt and playing dangerously with the club’s finances, and it doesn’t help that he seems addicted to tipping OnlyFans models when he needs alone time away from his wife. Isaac proves one again what a subtlely monumental talent hs is. He mingles that anger, desperation, and untapped loneliness with ease. Lindsay and Joshua exemplify the sadness of realizing that you aren’t the version you thought you would be when you entered the fiery promise of love and marriage. You can fail the person you love the most, and perhaps these two never planned on how to reconcile that disappointment.
Spaeny brings a palpable insecurity to Ashley as she watches Austin connect with Park’s assistant, Eunice, played by Seoyeon Jang, but she always feels like she is holding a secret from us. Even though she and Austin consider their relationship as a safe space, she withholds so much from him because she is afraid of facing a reality that might alter how he feels about her. In one of the most surreal episodes of the season, she lands in the hospital after a fall, and she and Austin come face-to-face with the realities of money and how the adult world operates. There are references to Oppenheimer, Paul Mescal and Letterboxd that will have members of Film Twitter yelling at their televisions. It’s a nuanced, layered performance.
The hardest job lands at Melton’s feet. Austin’s connection to Eunice opens his eyes to how people may talk about his heritage, and he feels a sensory pull away from Ashley. “I have never been around this many Koreans before,” he tells Ashley when they have a conversation about his new surroundings around Park and her employees. “My body is reacting to everything.” With each new performance, Melton comes more into his own as an actor who understands the careful hearts of his characters.
Some audiences were surprised by how season one of Beef ended (I am still haunted by what happened to Maria Bello…), but this story’s end matches that ambition with a harder comedic edge. With such a quartet of spectacular performances driving this season, it makes you look at your partner with fresh, unfettered eyes. “You can’t throw away someone who makes you better,” one married character says to Joshua towards the end of the season. We compare ourselves to others all the time, and the same can be said about one relationship to the other. Beef supposes that perhaps we all need to find someone we can go into blody battle with. If you can come through the other side, you will have truly found a keeper.
Beef is streaming now on Netflix.
