Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Review

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is now streaming on Netflix. This review contains spoilers.

“Sometimes I wonder did she really do these things? Or is it just a story with embellishments? Could people really be that cruel back then?” Lizzie Borden (Ella Beatty) asks this of her housemaid/lover Bridget "Maggie" Sullivan (Vicky Krieps) as they read about Countess Elizabeth Báthory. It’s just one of the many on-the-nose moments in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the fourth installment in Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s true crime Netflix franchise.

This season explores the 1892 murders of wealthy Andrew Borden (Charlie Hunnam) and his wife Abby (Rebecca Hall) in Fall River, Massachusetts. Andrew’s youngest daughter Lizzie is tried for their murders but acquitted by an all-male jury thanks largely to shoddy police work and the belief that a woman was incapable of committing such a heinous, violent crime. Those are the basic facts of the Borden case.

Showrunner Ian Brennan, who wrote all eight episodes, invents pretty much everything else in this clumsy exploration of, in his words, “a legacy of female rage.” That’s why two other real-life infamous women – the aforementioned Blood Countess (also played by Krieps) and serial killer Aileen Wuornos (Sarah Paulson) – are shoehorned into what is a show about Lizzie Borden. Brennan wants the viewer to know that women have always had it bad, as if that’s a shocking new revelation. Monster’s not as philosophical or smart as it thinks it is, sending its message loudly but often with the depth of a virtue-signaling social media post.

The truth about the Lizzie Borden case is that we simply don’t know the truth of what happened or why. Lizzie’s story changed multiple times. Monster, though, never doubts her guilt. The show opens with her killing her father and stepmother. It’s a whydunit not a whodunit. While subtlety is not really to be expected from any production that bears Ryan Murphy’s name, at least consistency would be appreciated.

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story begins as camp, its first episodes directed by Max Winkler with such rapid-fire theatricality that Baz Luhrmann would need a breather. (Winkler also works in some Wes Anderson-esque compositions at times.) That tone doesn’t match with the two episodes directed by Sarah Adina Smith, whose episodes are among the stronger ones this season. I wonder if binge-watchers will stick with The Lizzie Borden Story through those zanier early episodes in order to get to Smith’s.

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The over-the-top performances by Rebecca Hall and Charlie Hunnam initially portray the murder victims as undeserving of any sympathy at all. The show wants the viewer to see them get what’s coming to them. Later, Abby and Andrew each get their own episode that humanizes them enough that you understand why they became the people they did, so that when their murders are revisited the viewer is being asked (a bit too late) to have mixed feelings about what Lizzie, with Maggie’s assistance, does to them.

As a stepmother more wicked than any Disney animated movie could conjure, Hall milks every contemptuous line in Abby’s many cruel putdowns, wielding words as sharp as the axes Andrew keeps. Hunnam’s boorish, stammering Andrew oozes with disdain for women, drowning his sorrows with booze and affairs until he becomes a Jack Torrance-like maniac in his final moments (before literally seeing the light).

Both Beatty and Krieps do what they can with the material they’ve been given, but they can’t elevate it. Beatty’s blank-eyed, timid Lizzie evolves into a more cunning and confident young woman through her romantic relationship with Maggie. Alas, there’s no evidence either way if Lizzie and Maggie were lovers. The show omits Maggie’s testimony at Lizzie’s trial, and also largely erases Maggie’s Irishness to accommodate the Luxembourg-born Krieps, with her aged-up character garbed like a Victorian Annie Hall.

In a household where a maid gets her face scalded over making the wrong soup, we’re supposed to believe Maggie could come to work at the home of the richest man in town with purple hair and keep her job? You couldn’t even go to work at an office like that in the 1980s let alone in the 1890s. I bring this up as an illustration of how much : The Lizzie Borden Story strains to jam a modern overlay onto its period story.

The contemporary portions of this season, where it follows Aileen Wuornos, is where Monster has a better grasp on what it’s trying to say about feminine rage. You can’t take your eyes off Paulson’s Wuornos, although there are a few comedic moments in the “Bed & Breakfast” episode where she comes perilously close to channeling Kate McKinnon’s “Colleen Rafferty” character from SNL.

While Wuornos’ fascination with Lizzie and her trip to the Borden home is entirely fictional, the final episode made me wish this season had just been about Aileen Wuornos with Lizzie Borden as the side story. Or, Wuornos’ story could have been its own standalone season of Monster, in which case The Lizzie Borden Story might have benefited from having a shorter, more focused story that allowed itself to pick a tone and stick to it.