Lizzie Borden’s Bizarrely a Girlboss in a Shallow, Silly Season of Monster: Review

Ryan Murphy shows will never be accused of subtlety, but Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story wields its themes like an axe to the head. This is perhaps the most obvious possible joke to make about the fourth season of the anthology series, considering its subject matter. But it feels like a fitting tribute to these eight episodes of television, a blood-soaked trip through multiple time periods that casts Borden not as a monster (despite the title) but as a feminist hero of sorts, despite her (alleged) crimes.Ella Beatty (the daughter of Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, who also appeared in Season 2 of Feud and last year’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You) stars as the famous (alleged) murderer, accused of using 81 “whacks” of an axe to kill her stepmother Abby (Rebecca Hall) and father Andrew (Charlie Hunnam). As the show depicts it, this was a crime Lizzie not only worked her way up to with an earlier murder, but committed in collaboration with the family maid Bridget (Vicky Krieps), with whom Lizzie becomes intimately involved.Monster features multiple versions of the murders, but its canonical take is that Lizzie definitely did it, despite the fact that Lizzie’s actual guilt has been un...