Showrunners Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's latest Monster is The Lizzie Borden Story, an eight-episode, Netflix exploration that mixes fact and fiction with popular speculation.
As with the prior, Monster installments, which includes 2025's The Ed Gein Story, the melodrama takes ample liberties. Though wrought with inaccuracies, this approach makes for a lurid vision that horror fans will relish, even if it causes purists to frown.
Ella Beatty (daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening) plays Lizzie: a beleaguered woman who, despite young Beatty's beaming beauty, is portrayed as awkward in semblance and backward in mind. Perhaps, "backward" is too strong a term, for Beatty's Lizzie is more misunderstood and bullied than anything else and yes, pushed to the point of murdering her overbearing parents.
Andrew and Abbey Borden, the latter Andrew's second wife and Lizzie's stepmother, are enacted by Charlie (Ed Gein) Hunnam and Rebecca (Onslaught) Hall, and their depictions are vicious and vile. (Could Lizzie's parents have been anywhere near as cruel in real life?) The couple presses the series' maddening tension in this respect, and watching the two peck at poor Lizzie does make one's heart ache for her, but it also makes one wonder why the poor lass continues to endure the abuse.
The Borden clan is joined by Billy Lourd's disgruntled Emma (Lizzie's older sister), Joey Pollari's shifty John Morse (Andrew's brother-in-law from his first marriage) and Vickey Krieps' venturesome maid, Bridget Sullivan, who's called Maggie by the household. Though Emma makes a wise exit from the dysfunctional estate, and John fenagles about for personal gain, Maggie forms an intimate bond with Lizzie, and the two plot Andrew and Abbey's demise, first with a hardy dose of poison, which leads to a gross-out regurgitation reminiscent of Stand By Me and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. When this fails to kill the couple, the gals opt for a spontaneous, ax attack.
Along the way, Lizzie befriends Jessica Barden's Nance O'Neill, an actress she'd come to know much later in life, contrary to what's shown in the series. And, as is a tradition with the Monster series, there are juxtaposing, flash-backward/flash-forward, historical overlaps: one catering to Elizabeth Bathory, aka Countess Dracula, portrayed by Krieps, and one catering to Sarah Paulsen's contemptuous Aileen Wuornos.
Though the Bathory segments are the series' most ambitious and grotesque, the Wuornos track comes to dominate the tapestry. There's even a stretch where Wuornos and her girlfriend, played by Jessie Lee, stay the night at the Borden home, leading to a mystical crossroads where the killers have a comparative chat.
Though such segments are used to connect different timeframes for the sake of exposing certain cultural concerns (i.e. the suppression of women in a patriarchal society), they prove gripping enough to eclipse Lizzie's tale and could have worked in their own right as Monster miniseries, as opposed to inflated fillers. Even so, these portions are unnerving and therefore engrossing, thus increasing the presentation's psychotic quotient.
Even so, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is designed as a feminist anthem. There's nothing wrong with that per se, except that it's used as an excuse for murder, and in Lizzie's case (much like that of the Menendez Brothers), she could have fled the scene at any time and/or gained assistance to harness her aggressors. The same can be said of Wuornos, who needn't have sought and slayed men, anymore than Countess Bathory had the right to slaughter virgins to bathe in their blood. There's no justification for such heinous behavior, and because this edition of Monster implies there is, it betrays its title, or at least pounds it with preposterous irony. Indeed, for those averse to the blame game, you've been warned.🪓
