‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’ review: more maniacal melodrama from Ryan Murphy

“N o one really knows what happened that day,” announces a tour guide in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story .

Maybe so.

But this latest, controversy-baiting instalment in the Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan-produced anthology series, dramatising infamous American true crime serial killers, has lashings of blood-splattered fun imagining what did happen before Lizzie’s father Andrew and stepmother Abby were found axe-murdered in their Massachusetts home.

READ MORE: ‘The Shards’ review: ‘American Psycho’ author’s stabby meta-memoir is an LA horror story After Jeffrey Dahmer , the Menendez Brothers and Ed Gein , this is the first time the Netflix series has led with a female killer.

Well, alleged killer, given that Lizzie was tried and ( despite inconsistencies at the inquest) acquitted of the infamous 1892 murders.

Here, though, there is no ambiguity: Lizzie and the Bordens’ highly-capable housemaid and Lizzie’s sometime lover Bridget are very much left with blood on their hands.

Playing Lizzie, with an inscrutable blankness, is Ella Beatty (who previously pitched up in another Murphy anthology show Feud: Capote vs.

The Swans ).

Opposite her is Vicky Krieps, quite superb as the soft-spoken schemer Bridget.

Or ‘Maggie’, as Rebecca Hall’s Abby arrogantly calls her – openly confessing she can’t be bothered to learn her name and instead refers to her by the previous maid’s moniker.

Hall is a hoot too: a shrill shrew who chews on every word like it’s her last.

Charlie Hunnam, who played Ed Gein in the previous series, features as Andrew – a well-to-do coffin-maker who puffs away on his pipe and has rough sex with the house’s maids without a second thought.

Needless to say, his own personal axe collection is going to get a workout throughout these eight episodes.

Murphy and Brennan don’t hold back.