LIZZIE

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND GET ON WITH IT

Lesbians! Axe murders! Pervy old men! Big-name actresses getting their kit off! Phwoooar! Start your engines, guys! Wahay! Except... no, it's not like that at all. At least except the final reel, when the film completely shifts tone for the actual murders themselves and then goes back to being the sombre, restrained period drama it was for the first hour and a bit. It takes its time to get going (106 leisurely paced minutes) but it's perfectly well done and acted throughout, and the late change of mood does feel odd: either they could have been a little less emphatic about the murder scenes, or they could have gone a touch more Jess Franco for the rest of it.

That odd, slightly jarring swerve into sleazy nudey gore towards the end notwithstanding, Lizzie is a largely respectable retelling of the Lizzie Borden case: August 1892 in Massachusetts, when and where Andrew Borden and his second wife were brutally hatcheted to death. Only one person was tried: his younger Lizzie (Chloe Sevigny) was acquitted, but whilst the world largely concluded that she did it and got away with it (after the jury decided she was too delicate to have committed a crime of such brutality, despite the obvious hefty inheritance motive) the film presents a couple of other suspects for Agatha Christie purposes: his shifty brother, concerned for a substantial inheritance, or the housemaid Bridget (Kristen Stewart with Irish accent) whom Andrew was molesting and who was apparently Lizzie's lover.

For the most part, it's a quiet, serious film, as buttoned-up as their all-covering Victorian era dresses. Beginning with the discovery of the bodies and then flashing back over the six months previous, mainly concerning the developing friendship (and more?) between Lizzie and Bridget, it wraps up with the Most Likely Denouement, in which the two women stripped naked to avoid staining those all-covering dresses with blood splatter and Lizzie energetically delivered the fatal blows to her stepmother and father. As for what really happened: we'll never know, but this dramatisation is generally a solid, well-mounted and non-exploitative drama that crunches its gears a little. Worth a watch.

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