Lizzie (2018)

Lizzie isn’t interested in the nursery-rhyme version of the legend; it turns the Borden house into a pressure cooker of manners, money, and menace, where every hallway feels too narrow and every silence says too much. Craig William Macneill directs with a cool, deliberate restraint, letting Noah Greenberg’s shadowy, painterly cinematography and period design do the strangling while Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart deliver performances that simmer with longing, fear, and defiance. The result is less a whodunit than a slow-burn psychological thriller about what happens when a life is tightened like a corset until it can’t breathe. It’s not for viewers who want a fast, tidy true-crime rush—this one takes its time and doesn’t flinch from sex and brutal violence—but if you like atmospheric, actor-driven dramas that linger under your skin, it’s hauntingly worth the trip.

Lizzie is clearly aiming for a moody, feminist-leaning reframe of the Borden legend, trading lurid shock for a slow-burn portrait of repression, class, and forbidden intimacy. The problem is it often feels too restrained for its own good: the pacing can be glacial, the tension doesn’t build so much as hover, and the writing leans on understatement until scenes that should crackle land a bit flat. If you’re expecting a propulsive true-crime thriller with jaw-clenching suspense, this may test your patience, even with the grisly violence and heavy subject matter. That said, Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart commit, the period atmosphere is suitably claustrophobic, and if you like chilly, art-house crime dramas that simmer instead of explode, it might work for you.