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Lizzie review: Kristen Stewart stars in a glum, blurry true crime muddle

Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart in Lizzie - Saban Films/Roadside Attractions
Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart in Lizzie - Saban Films/Roadside Attractions

Dir: Craig William Macneill. Cast: Chloë Sevigny, Kristen Stewart, Jamey Sheridan, Fiona Shaw, Kim Dickens, Denis O'Hare, Jeff Perry. Cert: 15. Time: 103 min.

The story of maybe-murderess Lizzie Borden has fascinated true-crime aficionados practically since the date – August 4, 1892 – when her father and stepmother were bludgeoned by a hatchet in their Fall River, Massachusetts home. The did-she-or-didn’t-she game has never been conclusively resolved, though she was acquitted at the time by a jury who refused to believe a woman of her high social standing could be capable of such atrocities.

The new biopic Lizzie goes in for a heap of guarded speculation about what may have gone down in the Borden household, including scandalous lesbian trysts between Lizzie (Chloë Sevigny) and the family’s housemaid, Bridget Sullivan (Kristen Stewart). Their possible complicity was first advanced as a theory by the crime writer Ed McBain, in the 1984 novel Lizzie published under his pseudonym, Evan Hunter: this film has taken the same title but stops short of acknowledging it as a source.

Both women had lost mothers when they knew each other, and both, the film also posits, were victims of abuse by Lizzie’s father (Jamey Sheridan), a scowling tyrant who looks to deserve every axe-swing coming his way. It’s not too much of an extra stretch to imagine some furtive frottage up against hay bales in the garden shed, though the emotional charge promised by this liaison never sees the light of day, because the film is stuck in a rut, circling around its moth-eaten “mystery” and committing itself to a clear version of events only at the very end.

It’s good to have Sevigny back thinking her way through a role, at least, and she comes on strong by presenting Lizzie as a neurasthenic creature with a nonetheless stubborn will: she expressly defies her father to go out for a night at the opera, despite a history of epileptic seizures in public. The trouble is that the film’s peep-show ambiguities thwart her performance from going any deeper. Around the mid-point she gets stuck in a holding pattern, as an unconfirmed killer whose plan the film waits stagily to unveil; after Sheridan's character has decapitated Lizzie’s pet pigeons in an early fit of pique, she barely gets any other triggers she can palpably react to.

The film keeps mounting a vague thesis that these killings are impending Because Of Feminism, but the specifics don’t convince – why does stepmom Abby (a misplaced Fiona Shaw) come in for the chop just as badly? Aesthetically, it’s glum and muddled: shot after shot fills half the foreground or more with blurry sections of wall; the camera creeps around the leads or pokes through bits of foliage even though no one else is watching. Perhaps the entire curtain-twitching gaze of fin-de-siècle New England is meant to have possessed the cinematography, but this is a silly, film-school notion someone ought to have challenged. One particularly pointless shot is 95% barn clapboard, 5% Stewart weeping when she finds out her mother has died.

Her own contribution is a gloomy closed fist of a performance with a credible Irish accent, but Bridget as a character – witness, maybe-accomplice, let’s see – is stifled just as much by all the tricksy postponements of the script. Whether Bridget really visited Lizzie in prison or not, it was surely not an opportunity for the two to recap, in for-our-eyes-only flashback, the details of who got naked first before the hatchet came out.

After red herrings galore, the film finally lays its cards on the table, but breaking up this last-ever encounter with a wodge of bloody reconstruction kills any other dramatic purpose it might have served. It's dour period Crimewatch, stuffing its own antiquated hotline with earfuls of static.