‘Lizzie’ Is ‘Happiest Season’ With Hatchets

(TW: it’s all horrifying tbh)

When I was little I had a friend named Emma Borden and I refused to sleep over her house because I was convinced she was a descendant of Lizzie Borden and was going to kill her parents with an axe in the middle of the night. Why did I know about these gruesome murders at such a young age? Maybe because there’s a weird nursery rhyme about it?? Idk tbh. But a detail my lil closeted self did not know was that Lizzie was a lezzie and possibly conspired with her housekeeper/lover to commit the murders. I learned this in the gem of a movie, Lizzie, starring Chloë Sevigny as Lizzie and Kristen Stewart as Maggie/Bridget, her hot Irish housekeeper/co-conspirator.

The film opens with Sevigny running around the backyard looking stressed. She stops to eat a pear from their pear tree and make labored eye contact with Kristen, aka Maggie, aka Bridget. Maggie/Bridget is cleaning a window nearby, looking as constipated as ever. There’s a lot of bold violin music. We then hear a scream, presumably Lizzie’s, and see that her father and step mother have been murdered.

We go back in time to when Maggie first arrives at the house (which is still standing IRL and was a bed and breakfast until 2021 and is now for sale if anyone is interested). Kristen as Maggie walks like a butch but looks like a colonial…