“After innumerable plays, books, films, made-for-TV series and specials, and even an opera and a musical, you would think popular culture would have exhausted all the options for telling the story of Lizzie Borden, the New England woman who was tried and acquitted for the ax murders of her father and stepmother in 1892,” begins Leslie Felperin in the Hollywood Reporter. “But such is the fascination with Borden and the enigmatic story around her, a gory tale chock-full of intriguing timeline gaps and baffling stray details, that artists keep finding ways to reinterpret it to suit different times and tastes. The elegantly lurid but compelling Lizzie, written by Bryce Kass, directed by Craig William Macneill (The Boy) and produced by Chloë Sevigny in her best form in the title role, carves out of the raw material a suitably 2018 version, befitting of the #MeToo generation.”
“Six months before Andrew Borden (Jamey Sheridan) and his wife Abby (Fiona Shaw) faced that fatal ax—and despite the famous rhyme, each received far fewer than forty blows—housemaid Bridget Sullivan (Kristen Stewart) reports for duty,” explains TheWrap’s Alonso Duralde. “While most of the household refers to her as ‘Maggie’ (the generic name given to all Irish servants, much as all Pullman porters once answered to ‘George’), Lizzie (Sevigny) immediately calls her by her given name. Right away, there’s an electricity between them . . . Between the camerawork and the subtle performances, Lizzie could very easily have been a silent film while still telling its story as effectively. But [screenwriter Bryce Kass’s] dialogue is terrific, from Lizzie and Bridget’s tentative (then passionate) courtship to the sick burn Lizzie delivers to Andrew when he calls her ‘an abomination’ for her affair with the maid.”
“Sevigny has been ripe for a juicy role like this for some time,” writes Jordan Hoffman in the Guardian.
“Just as Sevigny is full of steely gazes and brittle quips, Stewart is beautifully anguished, her kohl-eyed face revealing years of sorrow,” finds Anthony Kaufman in Screen. “But together, their relationship never reaches the kind of authenticity or deeper intimacy that would give the film an emotional anchor. Rather, like a horror film Lizzie provides its thrills through shock value. When the murders are finally shown, it’s a lurid, gruesome, and bloody freak-show, like De Palma’s Carrie by way of Sophia Coppola’s recent similarly-set period film The Beguiled.”
“Lizzie is too often a case study in unearned pregnant pauses and longing stares,” finds Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com. “It never feels lived-in.”
“Noah Greenberg’s cinematography is stunning,” declares Variety’s Peter Debruge. “He frames his actresses with the house, shooting them in shallow focus behind windows and railings to make them look like prisoners.”
Filmmaker interviews Greenberg and gets Macneill talking about the house they filmed in. For IndieWire, Kate Erbland reports on the Q&A, and Lizzie is one of the films Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes discuss in today’s Film Comment Podcast (29’06”).
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