Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Review - Netflix 2026

We're in Fall River, Massachusetts, in the stuffy, oppressive summer of 1892. Lizzie Borden (Ella Beatty) is a woman trapped in a cruel Victorian-era household, suffocating under the thumb of a father who treats his daughters like furniture and a stepmother who's barely warmer than the wallpaper. When the house finally boils over, Lizzie kills her parents in a gory ax murder that shocks the nation - and the show makes no attempt to pretend otherwise. What follows is part psychological portrait, part gothic horror, part courtroom-adjacent dread, all wrapped in the familiar Monster packaging. It's streaming now in the US, and at a lean single season, it's the kind of thing you can devour over a weekend and then argue about at brunch.

Let's start with the obvious: the casting is insane, in the best way. Ella Beatty steps into the bloodstained shoes of Lizzie Borden, and she's magnetic - all clenched jaw and flickering eyes, a young woman who's been polite for so long that the politeness has started to rot. She doesn't play crazy. She plays cornered, which is so much scarier. Rebecca Hall and Charlie Hunnam round out the doomed parents, and the show wisely lets them be petty tyrants rather than cartoon villains. Hunnam's Andrew is a miser with a soft voice and dead eyes; Hall's Abby is a woman who married into a fortune and a grudge. You understand, within about twenty minutes, why this house is a pressure cooker with the valve welded shut.

The MVP of the supporting cast might be Vicky Krieps as Bridget Sullivan, the Irish maid who becomes our witness, our moral compass, and occasionally our unreliable narrator. Krieps plays her with a weary watchfulness that turns every innocuous line into a confession. And then there's the Sarah Paulson of it all - she shows up as Aileen Wuornos, which is a wild swing that belongs to a much bigger, weirder universe, and we'll get to that.

Visually, the show is a gorgeous tomb. The Borden house is shot like a haunted exhibit: low ceilings, brown light, lace doilies that look like cobwebs, and a heat you can practically feel through the screen. The ax stuff is nasty and immediate - no artful cutaways here, which will delight some viewers and send others scrambling for the remote. The score leans on dissonant strings, and the editing occasionally gets cute in ways that undercut the dread. When it's good, it's genuinely chilling. When it's not, it's a period drama with a body count, and the pacing in the middle stretch starts to sag under its own self-importance.

The real question is what this show is. It announces itself as a reclamation - the cruel Victorian-era household as the true crime scene, a girl who snapped under systemic cruelty rather than a monster born bad - and then it hands the title over to the Monster franchise's more exploitative instincts. The Aileen Wuornos thread is the clearest evidence of that tension: it's a fascinating performance looking for a show that deserves it, and it gestures at an interconnected true-crime universe that the season never quite earns. The show wants to be a psychological excavation and a pulpy spectacle at the same time. It's at its best when it's the former.

Still, as a piece of talk-about-it television, it works. It's handsomely made, superbly acted, and built around a genuinely compelling idea: that the most famous thing about Lizzie Borden was never the crime, but the silence she was forced into first.

Pros

• Ella Beatty is a genuine star-making turn - controlled, feral, impossible to look away from.
• Rebecca Hall, Charlie Hunnam, and Vicky Krieps turn the household into a believable slow-motion tragedy.
• Production design and cinematography are luscious, oppressive, and period-perfect.
• Refuses to play the mystery card, which keeps the tension psychological rather than procedural.

Cons

• The mid-season pacing drags hard; the show mistakes slowness for depth.
• The Aileen Wuornos subplot feels imported from a different series entirely.
• Occasional stylistic flourishes undercut the dread instead of deepening it.
• It wants to be both sympathetic and salacious, and doesn't fully commit to either.

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is a bloody, beautiful, uneven first season that coasts a long way on the strength of its lead and its mood. It's not the definitive take on Fall River's most notorious daughter, and the extended-universe ambitions get in their own way more than once. But Beatty alone is worth the price of admission, and the show's central argument - that monsters are often made in drawing rooms, not born - lands with real force. Stream it for the performances, stay for the atmosphere, and forgive it when it overreaches. For a franchise that's already three monsters deep, this one earns its ax.