REVIEW: ‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’ Is A Vapid Look At Feminine Rage

Produced by Ryan Murphy, he does it again with Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. The only thing is, it’s another fumble that aims for spectacle instead of telling a story. The fourth installment of his Monster anthology series, The Lizzie Borden Story, manages to shift a story that has captivated generations into an image of white lesbian rage in a way that serves absolutely no one. 

The reality with Ryan Murphy’s Monster projects is that those who know the case and the story will ultimately be disappointed, and Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is no different. In the Murphy-produced take on Borden, the titular character has become a woman spurned by her stepmother, ignored by her father, and so awkward and alone that she can’t thrive in the society she lives in.

Directed by Max Winkler and Sarah Adina Smith, the series’ primary writing credit goes to Ian Brennan, who co-created the anthology with Ryan Murphy. Retelling the story of Lizzie Borden, one of the first true-crime sensational trials to grip the United States, Brennan approaches the character through a romantic filter.

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story dissects the infamous killer through a romantic lens.

There is a level of frustration baked into Murphy’s Lizzie Borden that is admirable. She doesn’t want to marry; she doesn’t even like the men she meets, and her family immediately labels the silence and comfort she seeks as wrong. Played by Ella Beatty, Lizzie is supposed to be plain, ugly, and a kind of neurotic who can barely function in public spaces. And yet, the actress behind her is beautiful, whimsical, and stuck.

Regardless of how much her stepmother, Abby Borden (Rebecca Hall), or her father, Andrew Borden (Charlie Hunnam), neglect or directly harm her, or how the world sees her, Lizzie is presented to the audience as an isolated woman out of time. She yearns to learn and not be defined by a husband (being defined by a girlfriend, though, that’s okay).

Only the reality of Lizzie Borden is that she wasn’t alone. She had a sister, a sister who very well may have helped her kill her father and stepmother. But more importantly, she had an abusive father, not a wicked stepmother that the series puts in place to make her more sympathetic. 

Moments throughout the series beg audience sympathy, a familiar path with this tale.

Throughout Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, moments push the audience to be sympathetic. And in all honesty, it’s the same beats that we see in history. Her pigeons are murdered with a hatchet, she’s chided for being a childless spinster, and she wears that isolation on her sleeves. However, the Ryan Murphy drama frames it in a way that pushes understanding by pitting women consistently against each other. 

Yes, Lizzie Borden historically didn’t get along with her stepmother, but the anger and abuse she was subject to came from her father. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is fixated on feminine rage and the patriarchy. Only, the issue is that it’s mostly men involved in seeing this story pulled to the screen, and it feels every ounce like it. 

We even see the stepmother get a sampling of sympathy when we hear from her private journal and see how lifeless and loveless her life is. For his part, Lizzie’s father is a bumbling buffoon, and Abby is a woman whose faults aren’t even her own. 

Reframing the stepmother as wholly wicked takes the story into full fiction territory.

The thing is, Abby Borden was a woman who potentially used her husband’s money as her own, secretly buying homes for relatives and bleeding the family dry. The parents have plenty of misconduct to address; it’s visible even just from a small bit of research. Instead, this story wants to write its own, which leaves me asking: why keep tying these projects to real people when most of the story is fabricated? 

Additionally, Emma Borden’s presence in the series is little more than a blip. Much of Lizzie’s approach to life and murder should be framed by the older sister who defended her and supported her. Relationships between women, and the support they find, don’t always have to be romantic. Even in his lesbian retelling of Borden’s crime, Murphy does little to frame anything as more than an idealistic approach to romance. 

The romantic quality of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story doesn’t stop at her romance with her maid, Maggie Sullivan (Vicky Krieps). This isn’t the first approach to Lizzie Borden that traces a Lesbian romance in her story. But this is the most willfully ignorant of the lever romance pulls in a story. 

For whatever reason, Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan won’t let women be evil, and it shows.

Instead, we see this romance carried through in the way the series approaches her crimes, and the women before and after her. While I can talk about the series’s fictional elements being bad, what’s even more frustrating is its dedication to not letting women be evil. 

It’s a domino effect that makes even the worst person an anti-hero. The series introduces Elizabeth Bathory (yes, the woman who kidnapped and killed young girls to bathe in their blood while promising their parents a pathway out of poverty) as a woman scorned, someone whose own pain made her the monster she is. And the same thing is said for Aileen Wuornos, who essentially is the series’ secondary protagonist, as Murphy and crew give audiences a look at her trauma and murders. 

While Sarah Paulson delivers a performance on par with Charlize Theron’s, nothing feels grounded. It isn’t that Aileen’s murders didn’t have some element of defending herself to them. But her glorification, and the romanticism behind how it’s presented, leaves a bad taste.

The series brings in other female serial murderers, romanticizing them in poor taste.

Women can be evil. Women have been evil. While becoming a monster because of the world around you, Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s goal of creating sympathetic people out of his monsters remains negligent at worst and purposefully gross, siphoning off of true crime’s fascination with rehabbing villains rather than honoring the victims. But at this point, it shouldn’t be surprising. This is the Ryan Murphy project m.o., and it’s what the series has done regardless of the time period. 

At its core, like Monster: The Ed Gein Story before it and others, this is a fine television series. It oozes style, and the performances can capture the audience. But ultimately, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story exists to entertain a dull audience that forgets history is worth learning, that women can exist outside romance, and that evil can exist without justification. 

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is made for simple people and true-crime-obsessed individuals who refuse to do more than idolize the killers they learn about. This is a vapid look at feminine rage, with a narrative meant to capture white womanhood more than actually being interesting. We’ve seen true crime done well, and Netflix’s investment in Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan refuses to meet that standard. 

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is streaming now, exclusively on Netflix.