‘Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story’ terrified/conquered half the world a couple of years ago. And, although I personally find that it lacked something, it did contain a couple of great episodes (the first and the sixth), outstanding moments, it was hair-raising, and it had an excellent performance by Evan Peters, soaring, like this , above other films about the serial killer. Ryan Murphy is not a fool, and he saw that there was an opportunity to start another of his sagas.
But, if you have so many franchises, you should try to differentiate them. And that is the main problem with this ‘The Story of Lyle and Erik Menéndez’: we don’t really know what it is. It lacks darkness for what ‘Monsters’ was supposed to have in theory (it certainly isn’t even half that of ‘Dahmer’), looking more like another of its franchises, ‘American Crime Story’.
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan repeat as showrunners, and the direction is once again left to their collaborators: with the exception of one episode directed by Brennan, the rest is shared between Carl Franklin, Paris Barclay, Michael Uppendahl and Max Wrinkler. Here the case of the Menéndez brothers is taken, who brutally murdered their parents, later arguing in the trial that it was due to sexual abuse to which they were subjected (mainly the father) since they were children. As there are doubts about whether this is the truth, or whether they were two psychopaths who killed them to keep the money (this is what the jury that convicted them spoke about), we opt here for an unreliable-but-it-is-narrator approach. quite chaotic.
If in ‘Dahmer’ we were amazed by Evan Peters, here the best is Javier Bardem, who manages to carry out a character that is actually quite blurred. Both he and Chloë Sevigny do what they can playing the parents with that script as source material, and the previously unknown Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez are making a name for themselves (especially Koch) thanks to their role as brothers. A role with a very uncomfortable sexual tone if we take into account that we are talking about a real story in which either it involves victims of childhood sexual abuse, or psychopaths who shot their parents. Neither of the two cases is the last backfire that has occurred to ‘American Horror Story’ precisely.
In any case, the secondary ones work better: Ari Graynor (‘The Sopranos’, ‘Fringe’) and the always wonderful Nathan Lane (that scene with the servant!). Only in one episode (the fifth) does the series seem to take itself and its characters more seriously, although in the following ones it somewhat undermines what it has achieved, as commented in Variety. In general there is a tone halfway between the most sober point of ‘American Crime Story’ and the camp of ‘American Horror Story’, without being very serious, nor very dark nor very pop (despite the mentions of Milli Vanilli or Slight). I guess that’s normal when you have eight hundred franchises running at once. In fact, the same problem may arise with ‘Grotesquerie’: what will this series have to differentiate it from ‘American Horror Story’? Or will it be another flight forward for Ryan Murphy? We will know soon.
