Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story centers on the themes of female rage and repression, a narrative angle heavily promoted by creators Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy. However, in a television landscape saturated with dramas exploring gendered frustrations since the eras of Big Little Lies and #MeToo, this latest entry in the anthology series fails to offer fresh insight or necessary nuance. The season, which follows the infamous 1892 axe murders in Fall River, Massachusetts, utilizes the case as a vehicle to address a wide array of societal plagues affecting women, including domestic violence, sexual assault, menstrual taboos, and the pressures of marriage and beauty.
Written by Brennan, the series draws a tenuous connection between Lizzie Borden, the 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Báthory, and 1990s serial killer Aileen Wuornos. This approach results in a historically loose retelling that bears little resemblance to fact. The production casts 26-year-old Ella Beatty as a youthful Lizzie, who ages to her 60s over the course of the series, while Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall portray her parents, significantly younger than their real-life counterparts were. The show is replete with anachronisms and fabricated events, such as an oyster poisoning scene and a revised account of the murder of Bertha Manchester, played by Linda Reiter.
Vicky Krieps delivers a standout performance as Bridget Sullivan, known historically as Maggie, the family maid. Depicted as a glamorous, androgynous outsider with pharmacological skills and a shag haircut, Maggie serves as the narrative bridge connecting Lizzie to other historical female murderers. In one striking sequence, Maggie reads from a text about Báthory while Krieps appears in goth-inspired attire, set to The Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb,” illustrating Lizzie’s fascination with the “Blood Countess.”
Sarah Paulson appears later in the season as Aileen Wuornos, portrayed as being inspired by Lizzie’s legend. The series uses Wuornos’s story to depict sexual violence and explores her queerness through a fantasy sequence involving both Lizzie and Maggie. Despite thelavish Gilded Age interiors designed by Matthew Flood Ferguson, the show struggles to define its message regarding lesbians and murder, leaving room for ambiguous and potentially dark interpretations.
The differing fates of the three women—Lizzie’s acquittal, Wuornos’s execution, and Báthory’s imprisonment and death—fail to coalesce into a coherent argument about privilege, patriarchy, or female agency. The review suggests that the series treats the hardships of womanhood as a repetitive endpoint rather than a starting point for deeper exploration. While the cast is compelling, the article argues that other recent projects, such as the series Furious by Liz Meriwether, handle similar themes of systemic misogyny and female rage with greater effectiveness and originality.
Brennan has noted the predominantly male creative team behind the production, including director Max Winkler, through a line in the premiere where Maggie critiques Lizzie’s male-dominated library. Whether this serves as a self-aware apology or a fleeting joke remains unclear, but the final product is viewed as a derivative remix that adds little to the existing canon of true-crime storytelling.
Ryan Murphy’s factory churns out similar shows every season. I’m genuinely surprised this one is this derivative.
How can they claim to explore female rage when the script barely scratches the surface of the actual facts?
Wait, the maid is portrayed as glamorous and androgynous? That sounds like pure fantasy, not history.
Finally, a review that calls out the lazy writing. Lizzie deserves better than this cliché-riddled treatment.