Monster: The Ed Gein Story

The Butcher in the Mirror

Around the midpoint of Ian Brennan’s *Monster: The Ed Gein Story*, Ed turns his blood-smeared face straight toward the camera and says, "You shouldn't be watching this." Then he revs a chainsaw. It's such a brazen, borderline ridiculous moment that I laughed. Here is Netflix's eight-episode third entry in a hugely profitable true-crime franchise scolding the audience for pressing play. Maybe that works for you. For me, it felt like being lectured by the ticket seller after the curtain went up.

We have been living inside the Ryan Murphy-adjacent playbook for long enough that the beats are impossible to miss. *Dahmer* at least tried to keep the victims in frame before losing its nerve, then came the Menendez brothers. Now Brennan, taking the solo creator slot here even though Murphy's fingerprints remain all over the wall, moves to Ed Gein's Wisconsin farm in the 1950s. Gein is American horror royalty—the grave robber who fed Norman Bates, Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill. But because the real Gein only has two confirmed murders, the series decides the facts aren't juicy enough. So it pads itself with feverish speculation, imaginary Nazi war criminals, and an invented true-crime fangirl girlfriend named Adeline (Suzanna Son) who practically eggs him on toward necrophilia.



The aggravating part is that there is a real performance trapped inside all this self-satisfied ugliness. Charlie Hunnam disappears into Gein. After years of playing swaggering, wide-shouldered antiheroes like Jax Teller in *Sons of Anarchy*, he makes himself small. He talks in a thin, hesitant whisper. His shoulders collapse. His eyes slide away from confrontation like they expect a blow. Watch his hands tremble and flutter whenever someone addresses him. He plays Gein's schizophrenia less as villain-brand seasoning than as a terrifying mental enclosure. For stretches, he almost convinces you the script deserves him.

Almost. The show surrounds Hunnam with grotesques and sermonizing distractions, chief among them Laurie Metcalf as his mother, Augusta. We've all seen the puritanical monster-mother archetype, but Metcalf lunges at it with the frantic menace of a bird trapped indoors. She doesn't dominate scenes so much as strip the air out of them. Even she can't steady a story that keeps veering off to make blunt points about pop culture. Suddenly Tom Hollander appears as Alfred Hitchcock, or Gein is reading comic books about Ilse Koch (Vicky Krieps), the "Bitch of Buchenwald". I honestly couldn't tell you what argument the show thinks it's making by linking a lonely Wisconsin killer to the architects of the Holocaust, and I don't think the show knows either. It just likes the contamination of the association.



That gets to the series' central hypocrisy. It desperately wants to pose as a serious thesis on how media obsession and morbid curiosity create monsters. Judy Berman, writing for *TIME*, nailed the problem when she said the season "layers hypocrisy as well as sanctimony over the grubby, tedious nihilism" of the genre and finally reveals "nothing but contempt for its audience". Exactly. The show cannot claim moral altitude while bathing every skin scrap and desecrated grave in golden-hour beauty. It keeps caressing the gore it insists we are depraved for noticing.

You don't get to do both. You don't get to build a haunted attraction out of a slaughterhouse and then sneer at the people who bought admission.



By the last episode—when the show, for reasons beyond reason, tries to sketch some line forward to Ted Bundy—I was mostly tired. What stays with me is not insight into Ed Gein, or into loneliness, or into the way mental illness can deform a life. What stays is the feeling of being conned by someone who expects gratitude afterward. Charlie Hunnam's worn, tragic physicality deserved a story curious about Ed Gein the person, not Ed Gein the franchise asset.