With about twenty seconds left in the new “Monster” trailer, Netflix cuts to a woman standing in an upstairs bedroom, and the whole season suddenly makes sense. The wallpaper behind her is heavy Victorian floral. There is a gas-style sconce burning on the wall and a carved dark-wood bedstead over her shoulder, and hanging beside her is a framed black-and-white portrait of a woman in a black hat and a high-collared black dress. Standing in front of all that, blonde and weathered and holding a lit cigarette, is Sarah Paulson in a blue Members Only jacket. You can read the brand name on the chest pocket. She is a hundred years out of place and the show has framed her like she owns the room.
That is Aileen Wuornos, and this is the first time anyone has actually seen her in this thing. Netflix dropped the full trailer for “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story” on Wednesday, eight episodes landing all at once on September 17, and it does what the teaser nine days earlier pointedly refused to do. It shows you the season’s real structure instead of hinting at it. When the teaser arrived we said the empty stage and the hatchet in its museum case suggested a show that intended to walk more than one woman under the lights. It does. Here she is, in a windbreaker. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story,” including the position the season takes on who killed Andrew and Abby Borden.
She is a hundred years out of place and the show has framed her like she owns the room.”
Start at the top, because the trailer is built with real care. It opens on a hand lying palm-up in long grass with a single spot of blood drying on the knuckle, then pulls back to find Ella Beatty as Lizzie stretched out in the same grass in white, fingers reaching for nothing. From there it is all texture for a while: a warm blurred parlour, the Borden house at dusk behind its iron fence with the windows lit, Vicky Krieps standing in a doorway in a maid’s white apron, a hand pushing up into a mass of pink blossom. It is genuinely beautiful, and it is doing the same trick the teaser did, making you comfortable before it starts swinging.
Then the voices start, and they are not what you expect from a true-crime season. “There’s nothing wrong with blood,” Lizzie says. “Blood is power. Blood is freedom.” A beat later, over a candlelit dinner table with Krieps’ Bridget Sullivan serving: “This house, it’s like a puzzle to me. You’re like a puzzle to me. Never met anyone like you.” And then, flatly, “This is a prison for me, Maggie, and I have to escape it.” Maggie is not a slip. The Bordens are said to have called Bridget by the name of a previous servant, and the show is using it as an intimacy and an insult at the same time. Two shots later two women are kissing in a dark room, which is the season telling you exactly which theory of the case it has picked.
The planning is worse than the killing, which is the correct instinct. “A knife is too easy,” Lizzie says. “And a rifle is almost too kind a way to go. No, I know how we’re gonna kill them.” There is a shot of an axe going up over someone’s head in a workroom and coming down hard on a table, and a shot of two hands held up in front of a face, drenched red and lit redder. Rebecca Hall’s Abby Borden gasps in an ornate room. Charlie Hunnam turns up as Andrew Borden in a yellow-lit hallway, which is still a very funny piece of casting given he played Ed Gein last season and is now the man getting murdered. And somewhere in the middle, a voice says the line the entire season is built to argue with: “No way a woman could do this. This is the work of a man.”
That is not us reading in. Ian Brennan, who created this with Ryan Murphy and wrote all eight episodes himself, has put it almost word for word: “They literally thought that a woman was too weak to pick up an axe.” Beatty has described the season as “exploring a legacy of female rage and reaction to the set of circumstances that they are presented with.” So the trailer’s three big title cards are the thesis with the sarcasm left in: “HELL HATH,” then “NO FURY,” then “LIKE A WOMAN,” then “WITH AN AXE,” the last one landing over a black silhouette of a woman holding a hatchet against flat red. It is a nursery rhyme and a legal defence and a punchline stacked on top of each other, and it is the best thing in the trailer that isn’t Paulson.
Which brings us back to the windbreaker. The last exchange in the trailer is two lines, and they are placed to land like a door closing. Somebody says, “No one really knows what happened that day.” Paulson, in that bedroom, in that jacket, with the cigarette: “Oh, I know what happened.” (There is a word in the middle of that sentence Netflix will not be putting on a billboard.) Right before it, the trailer shows the Borden parlour sofa empty and sunlit, the piece of furniture where Andrew Borden was found, held for a beat with nobody in the shot at all.
So what year is that? Netflix says Paulson’s scenes are set decades after the 1892 murders, which fits the woman she is playing. Wuornos killed seven men in Florida across 1989 and 1990 and was executed in 2002. But she is not standing in a Florida motel in that shot. She is standing in a preserved Victorian bedroom with a period portrait on the wall, and that room in that condition, in that decade, reads as a house that has been kept rather than lived in. The Borden house in Fall River is a real building that has spent most of a century being visited by people who want to stand where it happened. The season already showed us the hatchet behind museum glass in its teaser. Putting a woman the world had already labelled a monster inside the exhibit, holding a cigarette, telling us she knows what happened, is a structure rather than a cameo.
The rest of the cast is filled in around the case: Billie Lourd as Lizzie’s sister Emma, Joey Pollari as uncle John Morse, Jessica Barden as the actress Nance O’Neill, whose presence in a season this interested in desire is not an accident. Beatty, who is Warren Beatty and Annette Bening’s daughter, is carrying the first female lead this anthology has ever had after three seasons of men, which is the sort of thing that sounds like trivia until you notice the show has built its whole argument on it. The trailer also spends two full cards reminding you it comes “FROM THE CREATORS OF DAHMER” and “MONSTER: THE ED GEIN STORY,” which is Netflix betting on a brand rather than a case, and given that nobody needs to be told who Lizzie Borden is, that bet is a little strange.
Where this could still fall over is the same place it always could. Borden was acquitted in 1893 and has been a parlour game ever since; there is almost nobody left to hurt. Wuornos is close enough to now that her victims have families who are alive, and this show has already learned that lesson painfully once. A trailer that ends on her saying she knows what happened is promising us a season with a point of view about both women. If that point of view turns out to be “wasn’t she fascinating,” the beautiful grass and the blossom and the red silhouette will not cover for it.
What Do You Think? Is putting Aileen Wuornos inside the preserved Borden house the smartest structural idea this anthology has had, or a gimmick dressed up as an argument about how women get labelled? Does committing this hard to the Lizzie and Bridget romance give the murders a motive the real case never settled, or does inventing a love story to explain a crime do the exact thing the season claims to be criticising? And after Dahmer, Menendez and Gein, has “Monster” earned the benefit of the doubt with a killer who died in 2002, or has it used that up?
See you on the next binge!
