Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story certainly isn’t dull

The crime
The grisly hatchet murders of Fall River, MA businessman Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby, on August 4, 1892.

The story, which will contain spoilers; please jump to the end to avoid those
I don’t know where to begin with a Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story review, I really don’t. “Well, why don’t you, erm, ‘cut to the chase’ and just tell us whether we should watch it?” Friend, I’d love to – but I gotta be honest: I don’t even know that much! 

It’s fascinating; it’s thought-provoking; it plays infuriatingly loose with the few facts we do know for sure about the murders – victims’ ages and vocations, floor plans – and scores Edwardian scenes, already larded with anachronistic dialogue, with The Runaways; Sarah Paulson’s portrayal of Aileen Wuornos (…you heard me; yeah, I know) is either tastelessly outré or brilliant, unless it’s actually both; I complained about Monster: Lizzie to my spouse for a full 20 minutes, and could easily have kept going. 

Could I keep going with the four-plus episodes I haven’t watched yet? I don’t know that either…so let me back up to what I so often say about enduring cases like the Borden murders, that they endure because of what we don’t know, because we’re 98-percent sure Lizzie did it (or didn’t) but those last two percentage points contain multitudes. 

And those last two percentage points present a wonderful opportunity for Ian Brennan and Max Winkler in their Monster-franchise imaginings of cases. Monster and American Crime Story return almost inevitably to ideas of repression and pathology, the warping effects of homophobia and/or racism and/or misogyny, and of the constrictions of society – the larger capital-S Society, but the smaller societies of unhappy homes or abusive families too. This is, broadly, a worthwhile tack to take in the genre, and sometimes, the result is very moving (Season 2 of American Crime Story; Monsters/Menendez).

Other times, though – more often than not, in Monster seasons – it’s misguided or off-tone, and can seem like it’s rationalizing ghastly murders (the Dahmer season) and desecration of victims (the Gein season). On paper, the approach makes sense for Lizzie Borden’s story, because it’s easy to theorize that desperation in the face of mistreatment by her parents, shame about her feelings for other women, and no hope of improving her prospects by conventional means could have, well, created this particular monster.

It’s been theorized, in fact, that Andrew Borden had sexually abused Lizzie and/or her sister, Emma; that Lizzie’s known shoplifting problem was a way of acting out downstream of that abuse, and of stockpiling resources to flee into a different, better life; that, once acquitted of the crimes, Lizzie’s sizeable inheritance allowed her to set up an “arrangement” with actress Nance O’Neil, and to deflect the gossip or censure the relationship would have occasioned had she had less money. 

There’s ample room for Monster: Lizzie to iterate in the grey areas, to explore the Borden file’s specific “the prime suspect must have, but also cannot possibly have, done it” allure, without straight-up ignoring basic case info. I assume this is designed get viewers in the tank for Lizzie herself, which isn’t necessary, or to fit Murphy-verse Company Players casting, which…ditto. 

Charlie Hunnam is very talented; he is 25 years too young to play Andrew Borden, who was 70 years old the day he died, and the addition of mortuary horror to his biography is superfluous. Rebecca Hall’s Abby as written and acted bears no resemblance to anything we know about Andrew’s second wife, and Hall is having a blast in the role, but past this “actor service,” I don’t understand the decision to turn a woman most accounts describe as an unobjectionable dumpling into a cartoonishly cruel harpy. (Or the lurid close-ups of characters eating. Poison in, poison out, we got it.)

And Paulson’s Wuornos…good Lord. Maybe Wuornos did use “Lizzie Borden” as her nom du sex work, but I still don’t get why that flash-forward is here. I can’t in good conscience use the phrase “backdoor pilot” given the content of the sequence, but that is what it seems like, a teaser for a future season with her at its center, and I…don’t know if that’s going to work. Paulson gets at Wuornos’s unique antic defiance, the way she would whipsaw in single sentence from arrogance to cringing fear to self-loathing, and I think there’s a compassion for Wuornos under the distracting stunt teeth. But, like everything else in Monster: Lizzie, the sequence and the portrayal aren’t given two consecutive seconds to be still and say one thing about one thing.

Here we are, however many screens later, no closer to a recommendation. I believe I’ve recommended to myself in this roundabout way that I not review Monsters anymore, because I can only say so many times that I respect the instinct to reassess major cases based on the breaking of queer spirits, but that there’s a way to underpin it with known facts and this show almost never chooses that way – so there’s that, at least, that Monster: Lizzie isn’t for case aficionadi. (Or emetophobes.)

The acting is compelling – Ella Beatty is not especially believable as the historical Lizzie, but she’s believable as whatever Dickinson-ian thing she’s doing here, and she has good chemistry with Vicky Krieps’s Bridget, who’s also very watchable. Jessica Barden as Nance O’Neil is actors-amirite-ing all over the joint (complimentary), in a way that’s serving Hayden Panettiere (also complimentary), and it’s an oddball note, but it works. And while the Borden-house set doesn’t line up with the IRL house and grounds, it’s beautifully designed; viewers with an interest in vintage mail-order medical devices will have lots to look at too. 

But like the Gein season, it’s an assault on the senses – and on sense. That’s not bad by definition, but eight episodes of it might not be the best use of your time.

Recommendation: …hell if I know, guys. Try one ep, LMK how it goes

The case in favor:

• Compelling central case
• Watchable on the acting and production-design levels
• Wants to say something about the genre, its monsters, and us

The case against:

• “Edits” the facts in evidence, to its detriment
• The acting is good; the casting is deranged
• Wants to say everything about the genre, its monsters, etc. at once
• And uses florid gore, projectile vomit, and graphic depictions of SA to do it