Love knows no limits

Elizabeth Lail

In the psychological thriller “You,” which will be streamed on Netflix starting Dec. 26, the romance that blossoms between bookstore manager Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) and student Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail) would have been the stuff that fairy tales are made of if not for one little-known detail—Joe stalks Beck when he isn’t trying to sweep her off her feet!

Beck, a Literature major and aspiring poet in New York, is out of Joe’s league. She may neither be as popular nor as rich as the trio of affluent BFFs she parties with, but her “little-girl-lost” appeal makes her self-entitled best friend Peach (Shay Mitchell) feel smugly superior.

Beck is the “charity case” who makes her conceited friends feel good about their moral ambivalence and devil-may-care indiscretions.

When she isn’t fending off her thesis adviser’s sexual advances, Beck desperately tries to get her self-absorbed boyfriend Benji (Lou Taylor Pucci), the poster boy for privileged white men, to pay more attention to her. But, the latter’s reassuring warmth quickly dissipates as soon as their rolls in the hay are over. What to do?

Joe knows Beck’s every move, thanks to her cloud account he has gained access to after one night of drunken stupor, especially after Joe rescues the inebriated Beck from an incoming train at the subway station.

Badgley (left) and Shay Mitchell

If Beck is in dire need of love and affection, lonely Joe seems like he has a tougher row to hoe. He’s had his heart broken by his ex-girlfriend, Candace (Ambyr Childers), who’s reportedly left Joe “to follow her bliss.”

Except for young Paco (Luca Padovan), his next-door neighbor with an abusive stepfather, Joe doesn’t have a lot of friends to keep his demons and sinister thoughts at bay.

While people see Joe as a loner, he sees himself differently—in Beck’s case, Joe thinks he’s the knight in shining armor she didn’t know she needed!

So when Benji and Peach start to get in the way of his budding romance with Beck, Joe does everything in his power to get rid of the increasingly inconvenient “distractions.”

As Joe and Beck’s romance progresses, the latter begins to notice some red flags popping everywhere—from a scary mugging incident at Central Park and the “eight-second sex” she can’t quite figure out, to Joe’s seemingly all-encompassing knowledge of her.

In the series’ 10-episode first season, Joe’s actions will further raise questions whose answers come in compelling spurts— and we can’t wait to see if his “obsessive affection” for Beck will eventually see the light at the end of a long and winding tunnel. Love knows no limits, after all.

Penn Badgley (left) and Lail in “You”

Badgley plays Joe Goldberg