A Franchise About Monsters Finally Lets a Woman Lead
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is the fourth season of Netflix’s true crime drama franchise that reexamines notorious historical killings through stylized, character-driven storytelling, and it marks the anthology’s first female-led installment by centering accused axe murderer Lizzie Borden as a complex protagonist rather than a one-note tabloid villain. This shift matters. Until now, Monster has built its brand on men whose crimes and mythologies dominate the genre; moving to a woman accused in 1892 of murdering her father and stepmother signals a conscious expansion beyond male-centered narratives. The season, arriving on Netflix on September 17 and streaming under the umbrella of a series about “monstrous figures,” does more than fill a gap—it challenges the franchise to ask what monstrosity looks like when patriarchy, repression, and gendered suspicion are part of the crime scene.
Ella Beatty Cast as Lizzie Borden: An Icon Reframed
The clearest statement of intent in Monster Lizzie Borden is its casting: Ella Beatty leads the ensemble as Lizzie, taking on a figure whose legend has long overshadowed her humanity. Beatty’s background in stage work and prestige drama gives her the tools to play someone both ordinary and mythic, a woman tried in 1893 for the 1892 murders of Andrew and Abby Borden and forever frozen in public imagination as an axe-wielding rhyme. According to Netflix’s official synopsis, the season follows “the repressed daughter of a wealthy New England family and her rebellious maid” as they escape a house built on humiliation into fantasies of sex, power, and revenge. That language is a clear rejection of flat victim–villain binaries; this is an attempt to understand why a woman in Lizzie’s position might see violence as the only route to freedom—and why the culture was so eager to turn her into a monster.
Rebecca Hall, Vicky Krieps, and the Politics of Perspective
A female-led anthology series means little if the women around its heroine lack agency. Here, the supporting cast is where Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story starts to earn its premise. Rebecca Hall plays stepmother Abby, the woman whose strained relationship with Lizzie helped fuel the tensions inside the Borden home. Vicky Krieps takes on Bridget Sullivan, the family’s maid, and by all accounts she refuses to be decorative. Krieps describes becoming “the adviser for feminist questions” on set, pushing back when the male writers and directors slid into inauthentic female experience. She demanded, for instance, that a pious book on Bridget’s nightstand be swapped for something the character might truly read—a small but telling fight over who controls women’s interior lives. The season may be largely shaped by men, but Krieps’s insistence on course correction suggests a collaborative model where actresses guard the story’s integrity rather than accept a male-skewed lens.
A Netflix True Crime Drama Wrestling With Its Own Gaze
Behind the camera, Monster Lizzie Borden is wrestling with the same questions the story raises: who defines female desire, violence, and rage? Director Alexis Winkler is blunt about the problem, calling men “idiots” whose grasp of basic female biology is narrowly tied to their own interests, and describing his “secret weapon” as surrounding himself with sharp women and trusting their instincts. He singles out Krieps as his “North Star,” the person who can immediately sense if a scene feels fake, wrong, or “male-skewed.” This is more than flattering talk; it is an admission that a Netflix true crime drama about a woman accused of murder cannot afford to reproduce the old pattern where male creatives define female monstrosity from the outside. The production’s willingness to halt the train, as Krieps puts it, and fix scenes that ring false is exactly the kind of friction a long-running anthology needs if it wants new storytelling perspectives rather than a new set of victims.
From Axe Rhymes to Ambiguous Freedom
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story returns the franchise to a familiar structure—crime, media frenzy, and an acquittal that leaves the truth unsettled. Andrew and Abby Borden were found “brutally chopped about the head and face” on August 4, 1892; Lizzie claimed she discovered her father’s body after being in the barn loft, burned a dress days later, and then faced a sensational trial ending in a not-guilty verdict that drew cheers heard half a mile away. She lived out her life under a cloud of suspicion, her sister insisting decades later that the missing murder weapon proved Lizzie’s innocence. What makes this Netflix true crime drama feel newly charged is its refusal to settle for a tidy answer. By framing Lizzie as an “icon who refuses to live imprisoned in a cage” and instead forges a legend that is “shocking, monstrous, and gloriously free,” the season treats female monstrosity as a story women might claim, reshape, or reject altogether—rather than a label the culture can casually pin on them.
