Miss Information · Screen Report
Darlings, the critics went into Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story expecting a history lesson and came out furious that they had been handed a fever dream instead. I went in expecting a Ryan Murphy production and came out having had the single best eight hours of television I have spent this month. One of us read the assignment. Sit down and let me tell you which.
Let us begin with what Netflix actually promises you, because the official logline is a document of rare honesty: a repressed daughter of a wealthy New England family and her rebellious maid, trapped in a house built on humiliation and cruelty, escape into a fantasy of sex, power and revenge. Not a reconstruction. Not an inquiry. A fantasy. They told us in writing, in advance, and then twenty-three critics sat down and marked it against the court transcript.
The facts underneath are these. Fall River, Massachusetts, 1892. Andrew and Abby Borden were killed with an axe in their own home. Andrew’s daughter Lizzie was tried, acquitted in 1893, and the murders were never solved. Ian Brennan wrote all eight of these episodes, Ryan Murphy produced, Max Winkler and Sarah Adina Smith directed, and the whole season landed at once on September 17. This is the first time in four seasons that Monster has put a woman at the center of it, after Dahmer, the Menendez brothers and Ed Gein, and you can feel the show straining at the leash about it from the opening minutes.
Ella Beatty plays Lizzie, and Brennan told TV Insider he wanted her partly for her ability to hold a blank slate of a face. That is the right instinct and it is the engine of the performance. Our girl spends eight episodes with the flat, wide-eyed stillness of a doll nobody has wound yet, while every other human being in the frame shrieks, seethes and slams doors around her. When she finally does move, it registers like a building falling over.
The gay of it all, which is to say most of it
Here is what you came for, and the show does not make you wait. Into that suffocating house walks Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan, the Borden family maid, played by Vicky Krieps, and everything changes on contact. She is competent, she is quiet, she is carrying a whole education in appetites this household has spent thirty-two years training Lizzie not to have, and she starts handing them over one at a time like contraband.
What follows is a full romance, and the show commits to it with both hands. Corsets come off. A garden shed acquires a spiritual significance it will never shake. There is a vomiting scene, there is a scene involving slaughtered birds, and there is a slow transfer of power from the mistress of the house to the woman scrubbing its floors that is genuinely, seriously well constructed underneath all the shrieking. Bridget presses a book about Elizabeth Báthory into Lizzie’s hands, the Hungarian countess of blood-bath legend, played in flashback by Krieps herself because this production does not believe in casting an actress only once. Bridget takes her to the theater. Bridget introduces her to the actress Nance O’Neil, played by Jessica Barden at a pitch I can only describe as magnificent. Every kindness is also a key turning in a lock.
And this is exactly where Krieps stops being a supporting player and becomes the reason to watch. The critics have been ungenerous about most of this season and near-unanimous about her: TheWrap said flatly that she is terrific and a good deal more interesting than Beatty’s Lizzie, and Readdork identified what I think is the actual show hiding inside the show, a vicious little comedy about who owns a home and who merely cleans it. That comedy is Krieps, top to bottom. A model employee quietly becoming the most dangerous object in the building. Reality Blurred put its finger on the other half of it: Beatty is not especially convincing as the historical Lizzie, but she is entirely convincing as whatever this show has built, and the two of them together crackle.
Nobody in this cast is underplaying. The Borden house is the loudest building in Massachusetts, and the maid is the only person in it who whispers.
They are not alone in swinging for the fences, either. Rebecca Hall plays stepmother Abby with the unbothered glee of a woman who has been handed a monster and intends to enjoy her. Charlie Hunnam, who played Ed Gein last season and has evidently signed a long-term lease on this franchise, makes father Andrew a swaggering domestic tyrant the show cannot wait to get its hands on. Billie Lourd is sister Emma. The house is full and every room is at volume.
And then Sarah Paulson kicks the door clean off
Around the halfway mark, the season looks at its own Victorian gothic, decides it is not enough, and does something completely deranged. Sarah Paulson arrives as Aileen Wuornos. Yes, that Aileen Wuornos. Yes, a hundred years later. No, there is not a shred of historical connection between the two women, and the show does not pretend otherwise. It is using Wuornos as a thematic bridge, the argument being that one infamous woman killer gets fascinated by another exactly the way Lizzie is imagined getting fascinated by Báthory. Aileen and her girlfriend make a pilgrimage to the Borden house, which in real life is now a bed and breakfast you can actually book, and the two of them find a use for the floor at two in the morning that the proprietors surely did not anticipate. Later, in a fantasy sequence, both couples dance side by side across a century in Lizzie’s shed.
I want you to sit with that image, because it is the thesis of the entire season delivered in one shot, and whether you love this show or throw the remote comes down to how you feel about it. TheWrap said Paulson appears to be starring in a different and equally compelling series, which is true and which I mean as a compliment to both of them. Film Focus Online said the thing gets considerably more exciting the second she walks in, which is also true. RogerEbert.com praised the Báthory and Wuornos threads specifically while taking the show apart over its Lizzie.
So was she actually one of ours?
Nobody knows, and anybody who tells you different is selling something. Here is the entire evidentiary file, and I do mean entire. Lizzie was acquitted and never tried again. She never married. She lived with her sister Emma until she died in 1927 at sixty-six. And in 1904 she met the actress Nance O’Neil in Boston and formed a friendship close enough that Fall River society would not shut up about it, and close enough that Emma packed her bags and moved out over it.
That is it. That is all of it. The Bridget Sullivan romance this entire season rests on has no historical support whatsoever, and Netflix knows it, and PinkNews made the sharpest point of the week about it: the evidence that Lizzie was straight is thinner still. She was an unmarried woman with fierce attachments to other women in a century that had no words to offer her, and everything after that is projection. Every generation gets the Lizzie it needs. Ed McBain novelized the maid affair decades ago. The 2018 film Lizzie handed it to Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart. Now Ryan Murphy has it, and Ryan Murphy has a fog machine.
The critics took forty whacks. I am filing a dissent.
Let us look at the damage honestly. The Tomatometer opened at 50 percent on a dozen reviews and has been bleeding all week down to 39 percent across twenty-three, with an average score of 5.1. Metacritic has it at 47. Audiences were harsher than the critics, which almost never happens. For context, this franchise has never been loved - Dahmer took 57 percent, Menendez 47, Ed Gein a truly heroic 22 - so Lizzie is not the runt, but she is not taking home a ribbon either.
The complaint is remarkably consistent. The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan granted the style, the energy and the performances and then closed the trap: it has nothing to say about Borden. TIME’s Judy Berman made the same case at length, that roping Báthory, Lizzie and Wuornos together implies a tidy sisterhood of murderesses that does not survive five seconds of examination, and that the show never settles what it thinks about lesbians and violence - which, she argues, leaves a gap where something uglier can move in. LatinaMedia wanted women in that writers room, and given that one man wrote all eight hours of a season about female rage, that is not an unreasonable thing to want. Variety was the loudest defender, arguing it brings something genuinely fresh to the Monster canon.
Now here is Mother’s position, and you may take it or leave it. Every one of those complaints is correct and almost none of them are relevant. This is not a documentary and it never once claimed to be. It is a gothic camp melodrama about repression, rage and what a woman will do when a house is built specifically to make her small, and it is dressed in blood and candlelight and a shed. Asking it for a rigorous thesis on female violence is like asking a drag number for footnotes. The number is the point. The gown is the point. You want the truth about Lizzie Borden, the truth is that there is no truth about Lizzie Borden, and a show that hands you a fantasy instead is at least being upfront with you.
And I will say the thing nobody in that 39 percent will say: it is never boring. Not for one minute of eight hours. I have watched prestige television this year that was correct in every particular and put me straight to sleep. This put me on the edge of my sofa saying “she did not” out loud to an empty room. There is a value in that and the Tomatometer has never once known how to measure it.
Camp has limits and this show sails past a few. There is prolonged, graphic sexual assault in here, and critics have fairly noted the series does nothing to help you land afterward. If that is not something you want in your living room on a Friday night, believe yourself and pick a different eight hours. Mother will not be offended. There is no prize for finishing.
It is not Shakespeare and it is not trying to be. It is Ryan Murphy doing what Ryan Murphy does, at the absolute top of his register, with Vicky Krieps giving a performance the script did not earn and Sarah Paulson walking in halfway through to raise everybody’s game. Pour something red, put your phone face down, and let the house burn.
That is the tea. Lock your shed. - Miss Information