Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Review — A Messy True Crime Mashup

Netflix has released Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the fourth installment in Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's true crime anthology franchise, and it arrives with all the subtlety of a hatchet to the skull. The eight-episode season explores the 1892 murders of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, a case that has fascinated the public for over a century. Lizzie Borden was tried for the killings but acquitted by an all-male jury, leaving the truth forever obscured. Showrunner Ian Brennan, who wrote every episode, uses that ambiguity as license to invent virtually everything else.

The result is a series that cannot decide what it wants to be. Brennan frames the project as an exploration of "a legacy of female rage," but the message arrives with the depth of a virtue-signaling social media post. By shoehorning Countess Elizabeth Báthory and Aileen Wuornos into a story that should belong to Lizzie Borden, the show dilutes its own premise. For viewers hoping for a focused historical drama or a psychological character study, this scattered approach feels like three different shows fighting for screen time — and losing.

What Is Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story?

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is the fourth season of Netflix's true crime anthology created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan. The series dramatizes the infamous 1892 double murder of Andrew Borden (Charlie Hunnam) and his wife Abby (Rebecca Hall) in Fall River, Massachusetts, centering on their daughter Lizzie (Ella Beatty) and the family's Irish maid Bridget "Maggie" Sullivan (Vicky Krieps). All eight episodes were written by showrunner Ian Brennan, with direction split between Max Winkler and Sarah Adina Smith. The series is streaming now on Netflix.

Unlike previous Monster seasons that focused on a single criminal figure — Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers — this installment attempts a triptych structure. The show interweaves Lizzie's story with fictionalized appearances by Countess Elizabeth Báthory, the 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman accused of murdering hundreds of girls, and Aileen Wuornos (Sarah Paulson), the American serial killer executed in 2002. This structural choice defines the season's problems: rather than deepening the Borden narrative, the additional threads fracture it.

Here's a thinking process:

The season opens with a whydunit rather than a whodunit — Lizzie's guilt is established in the first episode as she kills her father and stepmother. From there, the narrative jumps between timelines and perspectives, attempting to contextualize the murders through the lens of generational female rage. Max Winkler directs the early episodes with a frenetic, theatrical energy that recalls Baz Luhrmann at his most manic, complete with Wes Anderson-esque symmetrical compositions. This campy, heightened tone clashes violently with the two episodes directed by Sarah Adina Smith, which adopt a more grounded, naturalistic approach.

The tonal whiplash is not merely aesthetic — it undermines the emotional stakes. When Rebecca Hall's Abby Borden and Charlie Hunnam's Andrew Borden are initially presented as cartoonish villains undeserving of sympathy, the show signals that their deaths are justified catharsis. Later episodes attempt to humanize them, revealing the trauma and social forces that shaped their cruelty. By the time the murders are revisited, the viewer is asked to feel conflicted about events the show previously framed as righteous vengeance. The shift arrives too late to land, leaving the audience emotionally unmoored.

Here's a thinking process:

The cast does what they can with material that ranges from the operatic to the anachronistic. Rebecca Hall milks every contemptuous line as the wicked stepmother, wielding words as sharp as the axes Andrew keeps around the property. Charlie Hunnam's Andrew Borden stumbles through booze and affairs before descending into a Jack Torrance-like mania in his final moments, literally seeing the light before the axe falls. Both performances are committed, but the writing forces them into caricature before allowing them humanity.

Ella Beatty's Lizzie evolves from blank-eyed timidity to cunning confidence through her romantic relationship with Maggie, played by Vicky Krieps. The show presents their affair as fact, though no historical evidence supports it. More egregiously, the series omits Maggie's trial testimony entirely and erases her Irish heritage to accommodate the Luxembourg-born Krieps, who appears in aged-up makeup and Victorian Annie Hall garb. In one particularly jarring choice, Maggie sports purple hair while working in the household of Fall River's richest man in the 1890s — a detail that strains credulity past the breaking point. As the review notes, you couldn't get away with that in an 1980s office, let alone a 19th-century domestic service position.

Here's a thinking process:

The contemporary portions following Aileen Wuornos represent the season's strongest material, which only highlights how unfocused the rest of the show is. Sarah Paulson commands the screen as Wuornos, capturing the killer's desperate volatility with unsettling precision. But even these sequences stumble — the "Bed & Breakfast" episode features moments where Paulson's performance veers perilously close to Kate McKinnon's "Colleen Rafferty" character from Saturday Night Live, an unintentional comedy that undercuts the gravity. Wuornos' fascination with Lizzie Borden and her pilgrimage to the Borden home are entirely fictional inventions.

The fundamental problem remains structural. A season focused solely on Aileen Wuornos with Lizzie Borden as a thematic echo might have worked. Alternatively, a tighter, more disciplined Lizzie Borden story that picked a tone and stuck to it could have succeeded. By trying to do both — and adding Elizabeth Báthory for good measure — the show achieves neither. The final episode's wistful gesture toward a Wuornos-centric season only underscores what a missed opportunity this represents. For a franchise built on close looks into singular criminal psychologies, this scattered approach feels like a betrayal of the format's own promise.

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story streams on Netflix now. Viewers seeking a coherent true crime drama should look elsewhere — this is a case of too many stories, too little discipline, and a message that mistakes volume for insight.