Wait a minute – is that… Carey Mulligan? This great Bafta-winning British actress is the queen of containment. Think of her quietly heartbroken Kathy H in Never Let Me Go (2010), cloned and reared to donate her organs and die young like all of her friends, in the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. Or her slow, sinister rendition of “New York, New York” in Steve McQueen’s Shame (2011) – unbearable. For two decades, Mulligan has concentrated not on the grand gesture but on what is withheld. But in season two of Netflix’s darkly comic Beef, the dam finally breaks.
In one scene, her character, pushed to the brink, defends her dachshund from a snarling coyote, body-slamming it to its death in a paroxysm of white-hot anger. It feels like we’ve been building towards this – all those years of simmering emotion, arriving here, in the woods, with a dead critter and a pooch called Burberry.
