Beef Season 2 Review: What Festers Below

Beef season 2 is a timely, enthralling study on how our ugliest secrets and deepest shames can infect our most important relationships.

It’s only fitting for season 2 of Lee Sung Jin’s runaway hit show to be set against such a picturesque background with something rotten festering below, as that is the overarching theme explored in season 2: unearthing the ugliest parts of one another. 

Monte Vista Point is run by long-time General Manager Joshua Martín (Oscar Isaac, of Frankenstein), who frequently collaborates on club events and day-to-day happenings with his wife, Lindsay (Carey Mulligan, of The Ballad of Wallis Island). With the new owner of the club’s arrival looming, Josh and Lindsay try to assure members that the club is in good hands, as they will personally make the transition of power as peaceful as possible. While they present as the perfect couple, their dynamic behind closed doors is poisoned with animosity and seeped in vitriol. 

In contrast to Josh and Lindsay exists a fairly new employee couple at the club, Ashley Miller (Cailee Spaeny, of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery) and Austin Davis (Charles Melton, of Warfare). The freshly engaged and blissfully happy fiancés are living off of Ashley’s hourly wage as a bar cart girl and Austin’s part-time job as a trainer at the club. The wealth that surrounds their day-to-day baffles them as they can’t comprehend someone needing this much excess to live happily. 

One night, when Josh leaves his wallet behind at the club, Austin and Ashley are tasked with dropping it off at his house on their way home. When they approach Josh and Lindsay’s front door, they hear screaming and glass shattering, prompting them to investigate with Ashley recording a video in the event that something is seriously wrong. When Austin and Ashley approach the back of the millennial couple’s property, they catch the two in a heated, alcohol induced rage where it seems things have become physically violent. Right before things go from bad to worse, Josh and Lindsay see the Gen Z couple and stop in their tracks, horrified they’ve been caught. 

As the young couple runs away after being discovered, they make a plan to alert authorities in the midst of their shock and horror. However, once Ashley has a tragic and unexpected medical emergency, the honeymoon bubble pops as she and Austin begin to understand that happiness and love are not enough to help them get by. In a moment of desperation, the young couple decides they can use the video of Josh and Lindsay to their advantage as the atmosphere of relentless self-improvement and merciless capitalist thinking the club fosters seems to finally infiltrate their naive outlook on life.

Beef season 2 feels like the perfect evolution of what Lee Sung Jin set out to explore in his first season of the show. It tackles aggression and conflict through the rotating lenses of finance, self-fulfillment, race, class and human connection. Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny effortlessly take over the show’s mantle to deliver performances that change the dichotomy of the show to be theirs entirely. 

If the first season of Beef was focused on how anger can boil over to an explosive degree when ignored for long enough, season 2 is a captivating meditation on the way anger festers below our surfaces to poison every aspect of our lives. Season 2 repeatedly uses the motifs of insects, whether it’s ants crawling over the vibrant fruit at the club’s bar or dead flies in the ceiling lamp of Ashley and Austin’s tiny apartment, to show that no matter what class or social status you find yourself in, nothing is insusceptible to the rot undealt with anger fosters growth for. 

In one of the most powerful lines from the show, Austin declares that “we’re all just acting out about something that happened before,” which both eloquently and simply presents the thesis of season 2 while also spotlighting its overarching question: could you love someone if you knew the darkest parts of them? If their rotten parts were held up to the light, would you stay? 

In Beef season 2, Lee Sung Jin knocks it out of the park once more with an enthralling and contemplative study of the anger we can and cannot hide when we’re in a world that we constantly feel at odds with. Underlined by Finneas O’Connell’s perfectly pulsating score, the show explores the urgency of self-discovery when you’re supposed to already know who you are, the desperation we feel to find peace within ourselves and our choices and the terror of baring yourself completely to the person you love the most. While the first season of the series created a very high standard to meet, Beef season 2 manages to sufficiently raise the stakes. 

Season 2 of Beef is now available to stream globally on Netflix.