“The Beauty” Is a Hot Mess

In the new Ryan Murphy horror thriller “The Beauty,” a virus turns its hosts into perfect physical specimens overnight. Men wake up with rippling biceps, Hawaiian-roll abs, and the kind of jawline even other men notice. Women emerge youthful and thin (of course), with Disney-princess eyes and movie-star lips. A biotech C.E.O. named Byron Forst (Ashton Kutcher) packages the pathogen as The Beauty, which he calls an “injectable Instagram filter”—though it doesn’t enhance one’s features so much as transform them entirely, rendering the infected unrecognizable to their friends and family. Another side effect: these supermodel selves can only survive for about two years, before a literal hotness causes them to spontaneously combust.