Lizzie

The 19th-century ax murder of Andrew and Abby Borden at their home in Fall River, Massachusetts, remains one of the great American unsolved mysteries. Andrew’s daughter Lizzie (Chloë Sevigny) was the only person tried in the murder of her father and stepmother, but she was quickly acquitted of the crimes. We will likely never know for certain what went down that day in 1892, but that hasn’t stopped true-crime obsessives from trying to piece together the details of the grisly double murder into a plausible narrative. As directed by Craig William Macneill (The Boy) and scripted by Bryce Kass, Lizzie serves as an If I Did It for the 1892 ax killings, threading various Lizzie Borden theories into a single story and injecting it with contemporary politics. Yet despite all the lurid details and topical relevance, Lizzie is so chilly and inert that it belongs in a whacks museum. D.B.