“No one really knows what happened that day,” announces a tour guide in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. Maybe so. But this latest, controversy-baiting instalment in the Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan-produced anthology series, dramatising infamous American true crime serial killers, has lashings of blood-splattered fun imagining what did happen before Lizzie’s father Andrew and stepmother Abby were found axe-murdered in their Massachusetts home.
After Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez Brothers and Ed Gein, this is the first time the Netflix series has led with a female killer. Well, alleged killer, given that Lizzie was tried and ( despite inconsistencies at the inquest) acquitted of the infamous 1892 murders. Here, though, there is no ambiguity: Lizzie and the Bordens’ highly-capable housemaid and Lizzie’s sometime lover Bridget are very much left with blood on their hands.
Playing Lizzie, with an inscrutable blankness, is Ella Beatty (who previously pitched up in another Murphy anthology show Feud: Capote vs. The Swans). Opposite her is Vicky Krieps, quite superb as the soft-spoken schemer Bridget. Or ‘Maggie’, as Rebecca Hall’s Abby arrogantly calls her – openly confessing she can’t be bothered to learn her name and instead refers to her by the previous maid’s moniker. Hall is a hoot too: a shrill shrew who chews on every word like it’s her last.
Charlie Hunnam, who played Ed Gein in the previous series, features as Andrew – a well-to-do coffin-maker who puffs away on his pipe and has rough sex with the house’s maids without a second thought. Needless to say, his own personal axe collection is going to get a workout throughout these eight episodes. Murphy and Brennan don’t hold back. Blood and gore, melodrama, heightened hysteria – it spews all over this show.
The Borden story is hardly new to pop culture, inspiring everything from a Broadway musical to an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Not so long ago, Chloë Sevigny played her in 2018’s Lizzie opposite Kristen Stewart as Bridget. Here, Murphy and co. position Lizzie alongside two other notorious females. Krieps briefly plays Countess Elizabeth Báthory, the Hungarian noblewoman and alleged serial killer, in a bedtime story aside.
More intriguingly, by episode four the story flashes forward to 1988 Florida as Aileen Wuornos – the killer immortalised by Charlize Theron in the 2003 movie Monster – pops up. Played with a manic, thousand yard stare by Sarah Paulson, this version of Wuornos takes it upon herself to visit Lizzie’s house. In reality, she was in prison by the time it opened to the public, but what’s a little bit of falsehood between friends?
It’s an odd digression in a show that more often than not amps up the camp and silliness (not least in the scene where Abby and Andrew sup on a poisoned Bouillabaisse, copiously vomiting in a way that would make Monty Python’s Mr Creosote feel a bit queasy). Don’t come here looking for subtlety; you won’t find it, as Lizzie, Aileen and co. come gunning in grisly fashion for the patriarchy.
Like the rest of the show, the music cues take wild swings, from a sublime use of Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds Of Love’ to a way too on-the-nose cover of The Verve’s ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ at Lizzie’s trial. Still, full marks for including Lambrini Girls’ ‘Cuntology 101’ during the poisoning scene. If that doesn’t make you laugh – and demonstrate the irreverent ‘fuck you’ nature of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story – then nothing will.
‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’ is available to stream on Netflix now
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