🍿 Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story
Rating: 5.5/10
I finished all eight episodes and I still don’t know if Murphy wanted a gothic revenge fairy tale, a period soap, or a lecture about how every woman in history was one bad period away from an axe.
Ella Beatty keeps Lizzie watchable when the writing wants saint or explosion. She plays the tightness of the house better than the speeches. Hall and Hunnam go full carnival villain; Hall at least seems to know the joke. Krieps is the most interesting person in the frame when Bridget is allowed to be a person, not a device. The house and the lighting do more work than half the dialogue. Then the season slams the same idea—men bad, bodies punished, blood as horror and punchline—until it just repeats.
The Wuornos and Báthory detours are the franchise eating itself. A few of those scenes have heat; most feel like the writers got bored with Fall River. Anachronistic needle-drops yank you out of 1892. The murders are staged for maximum splatter, which this series has never been shy about. What’s missing is doubt. The real case lasted because nobody could lock it down. This version decides she did it, she was right, and anyone not cheering missed the thesis.
Strengths:
- Beatty’s restraint when the script is screaming.
- Rebecca Hall attacking Abby like she was handed a cartoon and decided to make it dangerous.
- Krieps giving Bridget actual texture in the quieter stretches.
- The Borden house as a character: cramped, ugly, suffocating.
- Occasional images that stick (the birds, the stairs, the aftermath more than the swing).
Areas for Improvement:
- Treats the unsolved case as a closed feminist fable.
- Overexplains the same oppression point episode after episode.
- Hall and Hunnam rarely get a human register; they’re volume knobs.
- Cross-killer fantasy sequences dilute the Fall River story.
- Gross-out and period-blood fixation that feels adolescent, not revealing.
A slick but hollow true-crime retread that prioritizes aesthetics over actual substance.
