Review: LIZZIE ruthlessly slow-cooks the Lizzie Borden legend
You’ve never seen the iconic murders quite like this.
We all know the disturbingly-playful nursery rhyme. “Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father forty-one.” It has enough melodic innocence to worm into your head and an impenetrably-twisted grasp that’ll never, ever let you go. As the legend has it, Abby and Andrew Borden, two healthy and upstanding citizens, by all accounts, were discovered slaughtered in their homestead in Fall River, Massachusetts. The year was 1892, and the only other two persons home that day were the housemaid and the youngest Borden daughter, Lizzie. Naturally, suspicion fell upon the young, unmarried Christian woman, who had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Her involvement in the double-homicide remains largely shrouded in mystery. There were no eye-witness accounts of her whereabouts the early morning hours of that fateful day, and with police skeptical of the new-found technique of fingerprint identification that was sweeping Europe, Lizzie was found not guilty after a 90-minute jury deliberation. She didn’t even take the stand. Even becoming such a loathed pariah among the community, she remained a Fall River resident until her death at the age of 66 from pneumonia. Nearly 130 years later, we are still morbidly bewildered and spellbound by the tragedy.
Director Craig William Macneill (most known for his work on SyFy’s Channel Zero) tightens such psychologically-gripping screws until your brain bursts wide open and you’re left with sticky grey matter splattered all over your face and hands. LIZZIE is as captivatingly-mundane as an Anton Chekhov play (think The Cherry Orchard), a full-body immersion in an otherwise ordinary day with ordinary people doing ordinary things. But here, the narrative is obviously and utterly extraordinary. Lizzie Borden, played with unsettling, deranged detail by Chloë Sevigny, is injected with a much more sinister underpinning. Sevigny colors with astonishing beauty, crafting a complete picture of a young woman who not only struggles with her placement in society but with her budding sexual identity. Her plainspoken performance, one sketched with stunning character work, is counterbalanced with Kristen Stewart’s (housemaid Bridget) more jagged and homely, yet still warm, rendering. In expanding upon their relationship, screenwriter Bryce Krass balloons the story into a much more dynamic through line.
The supporting cast emerges as just as vital and intriguing to the story’s pulse. Fiona Shaw (Channel Zero, Killing Eve) as Abby Borden and Jamey Sheridan (Arrow, American Gothic) as Andrew Borden are frayed, tattered endings to the unraveling of Lizzie’s mental state and operate as her ultimate downfall. Kim Dickens (Fear the Walking Dead, Gone Girl, House of Cards) plays the eldest daughter, Emma, in a performance that is very much wrought of women’s subservience of the time, framed in a vividly grounded direction. Inhabiting the role as Uncle John Morse, a devilishly-drawn red herring, Denis O’Hare (American Horror Story, This is Us) exudes the kind of slimy, money-hungry familial fixture that has been bred and born of the American dream. Each piece of the Lizzie Borden tale operates as both critical and auxiliary.
Really, it’s Sevigny’s show, and all the other players are merely expendable pawns in Macneill’s grisly retelling of history. While hitting the necessary story beats as we known them to be true, he brushes well outside the lines for a slow-burn that reserves the nail-biting pay-off for the last 10 minutes. It’s the kind of climax that might not suite most viewers, but with such mainstream success as with the Toni Collette-starring Hereditary within the last year, audiences seem to be more primed to engage with storytelling that leans avant-art pop than blood-soaked gore-fests. But of course, when Lizzies does, in fact, take an axe and give her mother and father several frighteningly-savage whacks, you’ll not only be thirsty for it, but you’ll probably wince at such brutal depictions of history onscreen. Even knowing the end-game, there’s absolutely no preparation to be had.
LIZZIE is out now only on Shudder.
Follow B-Sides & Badlands on our socials: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
