This spooky season, I am genuinely sick of serial killers and assorted deviants. I want to care about their victims, and not their twisted inner worlds. But the makers of Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story have now decided to bring us Monster: The Ed Gein Story, and I have slogged through this Netflix eight-part miniseries so you don’t have to.
It’s not that it’s all bad. Filmmakers Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan have a keen eye for detail and dark irony, for example.
The heavily fictionalized account of Ed Gein’s somewhat real relationship with Adeline Watkins becomes a brutal commentary on our very own obsession with true crime.
Gein’s religious fanatic mother, Augusta, has some interesting things to say about how men “burden” women with children, and the seething resentment that can follow – especially if a woman prefers to live in her own head, and that head is full of Old Testament verses. Laurie Metcalf plays her well, smoothly switching channels from folksy to diabolical.
And Ilse Koch, aka the Bitch of Buchenwald, shows up in hallucinatory sequences that show us how the revelations of Nazi atrocities didn’t just change history, they also broke our minds.
Some critics have called Charlie Hunnam’s Ed Gein too one note – but honestly, he’s endearing as a schizophrenic murderer and grave robber obsessed with body parts (and that, I think, is the point). There’s something about his acting here that’s reminiscent of John Cena’s goofiness, and for a story like this, it actually works.
It’s good to have the charming Charlie Hall – whose humorous TikToks I’ve giggled over for years – show up as Deputy Frank Worden, son of Gein’s final victims. As Ilse Koch, Vicky Krieps doesn’t always have the best dialogue, but she’s an arresting spectacle of evil as social climbing anyway, a beautiful poisoned apple.
Still, the miniseries just doesn’t work, not the way that, say, Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story worked. Its exploration of how Ed Gein changed pop culture by at least partially inspiring Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho devolves into the filmmakers loathing their audience and themselves.
Poor Bernice Worden’s character is particularly and horribly mistreated – yes, I realize it’s again a heavily fictionalized account, but her story of heartbreak and mental breakdown, which had actual potential, is completely wasted, turned into a morbid debacle.
I wanted to care about Bernice, and I ultimately wasn’t allowed to do that.
The story of Anthony Perkins and his struggle with his sexuality – Perkins was the actor who famously played the titular Psycho – is written and filmed in a forced, perfunctory way. Oh look, he’s also calling himself a “monster” while trying out gay conversion therapy! Hit me with that rhetorical hammer again, Daddy, etc.
If you were permitted to really care about the characters, you could make a case, but you can’t do that if they keep collapsing into caricature
Tom Hollander’s Alfred Hitchcock is basically Jabba the Hut trying to be a philosopher of the human condition, and not even in a fun way. Hitchcock had his villainous and his profound sides, but here he’s just a mess. You expect him to start drooling from the corner of his mouth at any minute.
There’s no emotional clarity or honesty within the narrative. Clearly we’re meant to understand that Gein was a very sick man, and that society’s obsession with him has mirrored that sickness – but then what’s the point of even watching? If you were permitted to really care about the characters, you could make a case, but you can’t do that if they keep collapsing into caricature.
Ilse Koch aside, the milking of the Holocaust for material could have worked in theory if it wasn’t treated as just another devilish spectacle. Why is Ed Gein suddenly fleeing ghostly concentration camp victims? I mean, yeah, he has schizophrenia, but there’s only so much sloppy symbolism involving dead Jews you can take before you want to pull your hair out.
I could also talk about the necrophilia, but that just feels like repeating myself at this point. The whole show is necrophilic when you really think about it.
Dahmer’s story and its impact, the way that it revealed how the killer was allowed to prey on people due to their low status in society, the chilling apathy it echoed, was much better done than this. It’s why I had hope for Murphy and Brennan’s take on Ed Gein.
The ingredients are there. The possibilities are apparent. The cast is gifted. But you can’t make a corpse dance even if it has all of its organs.