Ryan Murphy continues to add more schlock and shock to his shtick. Monster: The Ed Gein Story grabs for attention with cheap, peeping-Tom–style horror that plays to our worst impulses. Murphy again relies on a lowest-common-denominator appeal to keep the series’ audience hooked. You’ll need a shower immediately after to continue with your day. Monster: The Ed Gein Story is Murphy’s worst effort of his career.
Unfocused, unrealized, and unsubtle, while being compulsively watchable if you suffer from ghoulish, tabloid sensationalism, and only thought-provoking if you appear to be suffering from a criminal case of hybristophilia. Despite chilling turns from Laurie Metcalf and Charlie Hunnam, the series sensationalizes rumor over truth and mistakes provocation for substance.
Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story Plot
Charlie Hunnam stars as Ed Gein in a series that, unconscionably, attempts to glorify the killer, the real-life figure whose crimes inspired classic Hollywood villains, such as Norman Bates in Psycho and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. Of course, if you grow up to be a serial killer, you must have had a domineering mother. Academy Award nominee Laurie Metcalf (Lady Bird) portrays Gein’s overbearing mother, who is depicted as struggling with attachment and boundary issues.
The isolation of a cold, desolate rural Wisconsin upbringing becomes a character in its own right in the third chapter of Murphy’s horror franchise. So, too, does the unbearable, suffocating presence of Metcalf’s Augusta. Gein is shown spying on women trying on underwear, then dressing in women’s garments and pleasuring himself, probably because there’s nothing else to do in Wisconsin besides cow tipping on a cold, cheese-state night.
Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story Review
The main issue of Monster: The Ed Gein Story is that it combines Murphy’s decadence with true crime so that it becomes curdled. The story is a spectacle, with shock-first plotting, stomach-turning visuals, and even thinner psychology. The series not only has gratuitous sex and gratuitous violence, but it also combines both in a stylized product in the name of entertainment, with little substance or value.
Murphy and his team sensationalize any rumor they come across about the notorious killer. Combined with Murphy’s stomach-turning style, it is hard to put a finger on what is true and what is not. For such an infamous figure and his victims, the creatives owed it to the families to get the facts right, but those facts were used more as a guideline. This is used to connect and depict legendary figures, such as Alfred Hitchcock, which brings fame to a person who doesn’t deserve it.
Is Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story worth watching?
At times, you begin to question whether Murphy aims to humanize a monster. With better filmmakers or television showrunners, such as Brad Ingelsby (Task) or David Simon (The Wire), you could expect a more morally complex portrayal. However, Murphy and company make us squeamish from a standpoint that borders on apologia, mythologizing the killer.
Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story is not worth watching unless you are a fan of the genre or a die-hard fan of Ryan Murphy’s self-indulgent shtick. While Metcalf is chilling and Hunnam, who admittedly comes across as gawker bait before settling into a terrifying portrayal, delivers, they cannot lift the series out of the mud puddle the showrunners place themselves in to wallow endlessly.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story premieres on Netflix on October 3rd. All eight episodes were screened for this review.
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