The Beauty (Disney+) 

Rating:

Can supermodel Bella Hadid act? Sadly, we may never know because she detonates in her first starring role, splattering a cordon of French gendarmes with entrails and gore, before she gets to speak a line.

Hadid, aged 29, is the face promoting Disney+ horror thriller The Beauty, directed by Ryan Murphy, about a sexually transmitted virus that makes its victims instantly gorgeous.

‘Acting is a dream of mine,’ she told the Hollywood Reporter. The opening scene can’t exactly have been a challenge.

Bella plays a supermodel, mooching sulkily up a Paris catwalk in a red leather jacket.

Overcome with thirst, she seizes a water bottle from one front-row fashionista, attacks another, then goes berserk and kills a few paparazzi.

By the time she’s stolen a motorbike and crashed it, got into a gunfight in a pavement cafe, and finally exploded, the Press are already calling it Catwalk Carnage.

It’s all very stylised and striking, much like Bella herself. We still don’t know if she can act, though.

Maybe she’s got one of those squeaky, nasal voices, like a silent cinema star left behind by the talkies.

We also don’t know yet whether Nicola Peltz, aka Mrs Brooklyn Beckham, can act. She doesn’t appear till part 11, the final episode, and so far only three are available.

I’m betting she’s got a whiny, high-pitched New Jersey accent, like Minnie Mouse guest-starring in The Sopranos.

Minnie’s boyfriend Mickey wasn’t keen for me to watch The Beauty at all.

While other reviewers were granted previews of the show by Disney+, I was told that ‘unfortunately, on this occasion’, the PR department was ‘unable to fulfil’ my request for advance screeners.

Could this be because I called Ryan Murphy’s last Disney series, All’s Fair, ‘the most skin-crawling, toe-twisting, teeth-grinding, gut-squelching shovelful of TV ordure I’ve ever had dumped on my desk’?

Perhaps he took it personally. The Beauty isn’t as bad as All’s Fair, but then neither is scabies.

Like all Murphy’s shows, its chief problem is its lurching pace.

Heart-racing action sequences are followed by long passages of exposition, in which characters explain the plot so pedantically that viewers can easily scroll through social media and post comments while watching it . . . which is, I suppose, the point.

 Evan Peters and Rebecca Hall play a pair of FBI agents constantly having sex with each other and anyone else who catches their eye.

As they track its victims through Paris and Venice, the virus is becoming a pandemic. ‘An assistant editor at Vogue combusted in the Conde Nast cafeteria today,’ gasps Peters.

Jaquel Spivey is a fat, lonely loser, until he contracts the disease. Then he becomes the impossibly good-looking Jeremy Pope.

Plenty of people might think a messy death is a price worth paying to look like Jeremy Pope. And that, of course, is the message of The Beauty.