Lizzie

‘Lizzie Bor­den took an axe / And gave her moth­er 40 whacks / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father 41.’ This old jumprope rhyme has rever­ber­at­ed around parks, school­yards and res­i­den­tial streets for more than a cen­tu­ry, adding to the gris­ly leg­end of one of the most infa­mous crimes in US history.

But the rhyme miss­es out one impor­tant detail: offi­cial­ly the dou­ble homi­cide of Andrew and Abby Bor­den on 4 August, 1892 remains unsolved. An all-male jury acquit­ted Lizzie, the main sus­pect in the case, of killing her father and step­moth­er on the grounds that a woman of her social stand­ing could nev­er com­mit such a heinous and vio­lent act. In the eyes of the law, Lizzie was innocent.

Spec­u­la­tion lingers about Lizzie’s upbring­ing and men­tal well­be­ing; the nature of her rela­tion­ship both with the vic­tims and the family’s Irish maid Brid­get ​“Mag­gie” Sul­li­van; the pos­si­ble moti­va­tions and cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the crime; and the sub­se­quent tri­al and its aftermath.

Ambi­gu­i­ty, then, is key to under­stand­ing the endur­ing pub­lic fas­ci­na­tion with the Bor­den Mur­ders, yet this has appar­ent­ly passed direc­tor Craig William Mac­neill and screen­writer Bryce Kass by – their Lizzie is a full-bore psy­cho­sex­u­al thriller replete with scenes of incest, domes­tic abuse, extor­tion, a les­bian tryst, and full-frontal female nudity.

Chloë Sevi­gny shows great range and restraint in the title role, por­tray­ing Lizzie as a strong-willed yet repressed young woman lured into the dark­ness by thoughts of exact­ing revenge and the promise of a hand­some inher­i­tance. She’s matched by Kris­ten Stew­art, who brings a ner­vous ener­gy to the char­ac­ter of Mag­gie while sub­tly imbu­ing pro­ceed­ings with a rich emo­tion­al depth.

Their per­for­mances are the sav­ing grace of a film which, while cer­tain­ly not lack­ing in dra­mat­ic heft, seems more pre­oc­cu­pied with sex­ing up the scan­dal than get­ting to grips with those at the cen­tre of it.