New thrillers offer fine performances but few surprises

Good writing, not huge twists, make "The Beast in Me' and 'Malice' stand out.

- 

CLAIRE DANES and Matthew Rhys portray neighbors with dark and troubled pasts in "The Beast in Me."

Two more horses in the crowded field of psychological thrillers have come out of the gate: "Malice," now streaming from Prime Video, and "The Beast in Me," on Netflix.

Neither is especially surprising "in their beginning is their end," to switch up a line of Eliot though they do provide some suspense and twists along the way.

They aren't trash; quite the opposite. Each plays out like a book that constantly tempts you to skip to the end to test your impressions, but they're classy shows with fine performances and wellwritten scenes. Even in the extraordinary situations they portray, even when I didn't buy a plot point or a development felt too convenient, I rarely felt that characters weren't speaking as people do - or psychopaths, who are people too.

"The Beast in Me" is especially good, but it's got Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, and there would have had to have been some serious malpractice behind the camera for it to be otherwise. Danes plays Aggie Wiggs, a writer of nonfiction whose marriage, to aspiring artist Shelley (Natalie Morales, a favorite of this department), fell apart after the death of their son in an automobile accident. She blames a local teenager for it, and is not quiet about her wishes for him. She's supposedly working on a book about the unlikely friendship of judges Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, but writer's block has run out the clock on advances, and bills are piling up.