A Victorian Axe Murder Becomes a Darkly Comic Revolution
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is a Netflix true crime drama that reimagines the infamous 1892 axe murders as a psychological, darkly comic exploration of female rage, desire, and power inside a cruel Victorian household. That focus is the show’s real provocation. Instead of treating the case as dusty courtroom trivia, this Monster Lizzie Borden Netflix entry turns the mythic rhyme and unsolved crime into a character study of a woman the world insisted on reading only as a monster. The fourth chapter in Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s anthology, it follows the franchise’s habit of spotlighting notorious killers while pushing into thornier questions about who gets to be feared, pitied, or believed. With its first female “Monster,” the series argues that the Borden legend was always about gender as much as gore.
Ella Beatty’s Blood-Red Breakout
The most striking image from this Lizzie Borden adaptation shows Ella Beatty staring straight ahead, face splashed with blood, as if daring viewers to decide what they see: killer, victim, or both. It is a calling card for an Ella Beatty drama series deliberately built around ambiguity. Beatty landed the role after an extensive search to find the actor who could carry Lizzie’s mythology, psychology, and notoriety all at once. Monster gives the rising star her biggest role to date, after turns in the anthology creator’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans and Mary Bronstein’s Oscar-nominated drama If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. She has called the part a “dream come true” and frames this season as an examination of female rage and repression that feels uncomfortably current. In other words, this is less museum piece, more powder keg.
Vicky Krieps, Rebecca Hall, and the Feminist Troublemaking Behind the Scenes
If the Monster Lizzie Borden Netflix season wants to claim a feminist lens, it has to earn it, and that work seems to have happened on set as much as on the page. Vicky Krieps, who plays Bridget Sullivan, the rebellious live-in maid and Lizzie’s partner in escape, has described becoming an informal “adviser for feminist questions” on a show that is female-focused but largely written and directed by men. She pushed back on details that felt male-skewed, right down to swapping "some Christian book written by a man" on Bridget’s nightstand for something a progressive woman of the era might plausibly read. Director Alexis Winkler has admitted that his “secret weapon” was being surrounded by “really, really smart women” and relying on Krieps as his “North Star” for authenticity. That friction matters: it turns what could have been another lurid Netflix true crime drama into a tussle over who controls the narrative of female desire and defiance.
Money, Desire, and Dark Comedy Inside the Borden House
This Lizzie Borden adaptation makes a decisive choice about motive: in the absence of official answers, the series imagines money as the spark. With no will stating otherwise, if Andrew Borden died before his wife, her stepmother would inherit his fortune while Lizzie and her sister Emma received nothing. That inheritance trap, combined with humiliation and cruelty inside the home, turns the Bordens’ Massachusetts household into an American nightmare where desire and class rage collide. Netflix describes Lizzie as the controlled daughter of a wealthy family, trapped alongside Bridget in a house that shapes them through repression until they escape into a fantasy of sex, power, and revenge. The tone is ultra-dark, bordering on comic: Bridget and Lizzie “rage against the machine” and, in Krieps’s words, game a system that tries to crush them—and then cash in on their freedom. It is a brazen, morally queasy framing, and that is the point.
A Risky New Phase for the Monster Franchise
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is not just another entry; it is the anthology’s bet that its audience will follow it from serial killers to something messier. After centering Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein, the Netflix true crime drama now fixes on a case where the accused was acquitted and the crime remains unsolved, propped up by a schoolyard rhyme that “somehow made an already grisly story even bloodier.” According to the streamer, the season will explore how Lizzie “changed what the world believed a killer could be.” First-look images show elaborate period costumes, polished coffins, and doomed parents played by Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall, promising that the psychological drama will not shy away from consequences. Premiering September 17, the season marks the franchise’s first female “Monster” and its most openly satirical tilt at patriarchy yet. If it works, Monster’s future may belong less to infamous men than to the myths built around women like Lizzie.
