LIZZIE BORDEN REIMAGINED

FOR THE NEARLY hour-and-a-half preceding the notorious moment when Lizzie Borden “took an ax and gave her mother 40 whacks” in actress Chloë Sevigny’s passion project Lizzie, the camera lingers on her caught behind windowpanes and the bars of a stairwell. Those shots telegraph that she’s already a prisoner in her own home—with a miserly abusive father and his complicit wife. By the time she enters prison to await trial for their gruesome murders, it’s a respite from the purgatory that was her life.

Part revenge tale and part redemption song, took years for and out writer Bryce Kass to shepherd to the screen. But this version of the notorious murders from the tiny town of Fall River, Mass., couldn’t have come at a timelier moment. The film shares a lineage with the queer true crime-based films of the ’90s like and , but is a completely fresh take on the murderous lesbians trope. In the film, Lizzie and her maid, love interest, and co-conspirator Bridget (Kristen Stewart) literally bash toxic masculinity in the face.