Lizzie Borden took an axe. Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan took a whole lot of liberties with what happened after.

"Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story" landed on Netflix Thursday, all eight episodes at once, marking the fourth season of the Murphy-Brennan true-crime anthology and its first with a woman at the centre of the carnage. Ella Beatty, daughter of Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, plays the title role. Charlie Hunnam, who spent last season as Ed Gein, is back as Lizzie's father Andrew. Rebecca Hall plays stepmother Abby, and Vicky Krieps plays Bridget, the new housemaid whose friendship with Lizzie sets everything in motion.

The real Borden was 32 when Andrew and Abby were found hacked to death in their Fall River home in August 1892. She stood trial and was acquitted, and more than a century later nobody actually knows what went on inside that house that morning. The show is not especially bothered by that gap. Variety's review calls the season a genuinely engaging swing at the format, opening on the murders themselves before rewinding four months to build out Lizzie's world, the cruel stepmother, the absent father, the birds she keeps in her dovecote, and the friendship with Bridget that cracks the whole thing open.

TheWrap's review is blunter about how far the writers stray from the record, pointing out that Murphy and Brennan invent a romance between Lizzie and Bridget wholesale and build the entire back half of the season around menstruation, repression and poisoned dinners rather than anything resembling a police file. Both reviews agree the tone lands somewhere between gothic horror and full camp, helped along by a soundtrack that throws Kate Bush against a startlingly blunt use of the Lambrini Girls' "Cuntology 101" during a poisoning scene.

The Wuornos problem

Then there's Sarah Paulson, who shows up midway through as Aileen Wuornos, the Florida serial killer executed in 2002 and previously played by Charlize Theron in the 2003 film that shares this franchise's title. Wuornos killed nearly a century after Borden did, and neither Variety nor TheWrap can quite explain why she's in this show at all. Variety calls the crossover the season's biggest wobble, an echo of the Ted Bundy detour that muddied last season's Ed Gein story. TheWrap goes further, half-joking that Paulson's scenes are strong enough to make you wish Netflix had just commissioned a Wuornos season instead. Both reviews single Paulson's performance out as compelling on its own terms, whatever it's doing in Fall River, Massachusetts.

Hall gets the biggest praise from TheWrap, which calls her performance as Abby a scene-stealing turn played at full volume, while Krieps' Bridget also doubles as Elizabeth Báthory in a story Bridget tells Lizzie partway through, a detour both critics found less jarring than the Wuornos cameo.

Just Jared's rundown of the cast adds Jessica Barden, Joey Pollari and Billie Lourd, who plays Lizzie's sister Emma, to a lineup already stacked with Murphy regulars. With the full season already streaming, the only real question left is whether Netflix keeps mining true crime's back catalogue for a fifth installment, and whose story gets the gothic treatment next.