Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story

Our Review

Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s anthology finally makes a woman the monster, and the smartest thing about Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is that it keeps you genuinely unable to decide if Lizzie did it. Ella Beatty, in her first title role, plays the Fall River heiress as strange, still, and impossible to read, and Vicky Krieps, as the maid Bridget who opens a door onto Paris stories and herbal remedies, is the performance the season really runs on.

As production drama it almost never misses: the Gilded Age interiors are suffocating in the best way, and the decision to tell this as a dark romance rather than a procedural gives the famous axe murders a charge no retelling since 2018’s Lizzie managed. Beatty and Krieps have a chemistry that makes the 1892 setting feel dangerous.

Then it does Murphy things. The season insists on stitching in Sarah Paulson’s Aileen Wuornos and a Countess Bathory detour, and the connections feel asserted rather than earned, a thesis about female rage delivered by collage. The history, already loosened for effect, eventually stops pretending to care about Fall River at all, and Time and the Guardian were right that it mistakes repetition for insight about women’s pain. The trial, which should be the fire, plays second fiddle to the fantasies around it.

All eight episodes are out now on Netflix. Our score: 6.5/10. Worth a weekend for two career-level performances surviving a messy script.