Summary: For every physical model defined on a generic graph or factor graph, the Bethe \(M\)-layer construction allows building a different model for which the Bethe approximation is exact in the large \(M\) limit, and coincides with the original model for \(M=1\). The \(1/M\) perturbative series is then expressed by a diagrammatic loop expansion in terms of so-called fat diagrams. Our motivation is to study some important second-order phase transitions that do exist on the Bethe lattice, but are either qualitatively different or absent in the corresponding fully connected case. In this case, the standard approach based on a perturbative expansion around the naive mean field theory (essentially a fully connected model) fails. On physical grounds, we expect that when the construction is applied to a lattice in finite dimension there is a small region of the external parameters, close to the Bethe critical point, where strong deviations from mean-field behavior will be observed. In this region, the \(1/M\) expansion for the corrections diverges, and can be the starting point for determining the correct non-mean-field critical exponents using renormalization group arguments. In the end, we will show that the critical series for the generic observable can be expressed as a sum of Feynman diagrams with the same numerical prefactors of field theories. However, the contribution of a given diagram is not evaluated by associating Gaussian propagators to its lines, as in field theories: one has to consider the graph as a portion of the original lattice, replacing the internal lines with appropriate one-dimensional chains, and attaching to the internal points the appropriate number of infinite-size Bethe trees to restore the correct local connectivity of the original model. The actual contribution of each (fat) diagram is the so-called line-connected observable, which also includes contributions from sub-diagrams with appropriate prefactors. In order to compute the corrections near to the critical point, Feynman diagrams (with their symmetry factors) can be read directly from the appropriate field-theoretical literature; the computation of momentum integrals is also quite similar; the extra work consists of computing the line-connected observable of the associated fat diagram in the limit of all lines becoming infinitely long.