Monsters Review: Are the Menendez Brothers Stronger Than Jeffrey Dahmer?

Killers fascinate. Whether they disgust us, scare us or anger us, they fascinate us. The personality of the perpetrator intrigues us much more than the act itself: What could drive a person to commit such madness? Fiction has never failed to feed our almost unhealthy curiosity by drawing inspiration from reality, or even adapting it.taken criminals, Mindhunter, American Crime Story (also by Ryan Murphy), examples among many others, like so many stories that we tell around the fire to scare our audience. With Monsters: Lyle's Story and Erik Menendez, the campfire is a well-stocked table where the wealthy gather.

Two years ago, the very / too (delete as appropriate) prolific Ryan Murphy teamed up with Ian Brennan to give us a portrait of Jeffrey Dahmer, serial killer who made 17 victims. The success was immediate and Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story slips into the top of the most viewed series historically on Netflix. Enough to push the streaming platform to push the cork alongside the two men to deliver a season 2 (and soon 3) to an anthology show where each new batch of episodes will tell a different crime.

“We are the new Jeffrey Dahmer”

Here, we are interested in Lyle and Erik Menendez, two young men from the wealthy neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Rich, beautiful, they have everything except pride of an authoritarian father who only wants excellence and a passive mother drowning in the liquid of her own demons. On August 20, 1989, Kitty and Jose Menendez are found dead in their home, their bodies riddled with bullets. If the first elements of the investigation seem to point towards the mafia, very quickly, The two brothers, aged 21 and 18, are arrested. Why this parricide? This is what we will discover during these nine episodes that make up the season.

Or not. Because there is something special about the story of Lyle and Erik Menendez; a life where wealth and appearances prevail and where secrets stay in the familyThe problem is, how can we know the truth when the victims can no longer speak and the murderers are masters in the art of lying and deception?

If you were disturbed by the oppressive atmosphere of the first season and expected to be hit the same way, you could not be more surprised by this second volume which is only related by the theme and the title. Everything else is different. Photography, narration, setting… Murphy's experience in the field allows him to adapt his series to crime and not the other way around. And as we said just above, this crime does not have only one truth.

A fresh start like a corpse

However, the first episode seems to give us a clear foundation. Our Monsters are Patrick Bateman (the character from American Psycho) in power, worshiping their physique and their wealth, but ready to chop you up for a business card more beautiful than theirs. The series takes on the color of California and paints us a detestable portrait of these rich kids where excess is the norm.

Except that nothing really grabs us. Nicholas Chavez (Lyle) and Cooper Koch (Erik) are overacting, Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny are non-existent and, as always with Ryan Murphy, subtlety has been put in the closet. Lyle is quickly established as the brains of the tandem and Erik the injured man. It's not the very graphic murder that would convince us that the next eight episodes are worth watching.

The Menendezes seem like empty shells that only the crime makes interesting and the script artificially inflates all that. The characters, their lives, their parricide… everything rings false in Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez to the point where the act ends up becoming as ridiculous as the authors and here we are stuck in front of a show as white as a sheet that has just put on nine layers of self-tanner.

The art of the horrible lie or the horrible truth

Deception is a deadly weapon in the hands of the Menendez family, and even more so in the hands of Ryan Murphy. By the end of episode 3, the series reveals its cards and completely embraces the news story it draws inspiration from by adapting its narrative to a single fact: no one, apart from the two young men who are adept at lying, knows the truth. From then on, any attempt to show reality is just pure theory and the show will have fun realizing all the hypotheses.

Concretely, this means that Monsters will change the events, told or shown according to the episodes, the storyteller and the audience. The story of the Menendez will be taken literally by being a story that rewrites these characters, their relationships, their experiences to the point where the only reference point to which we can relate is the crime itself. The crime took place, the brothers are the perpetrators. Everything else is left to the discretion of the jury / spectator.

Without questioning guilt, The series plays with reality, with our emotionsnever hesitating to manipulate us. In this respect, episode 5 functions as the keystone of the enterprise through its more intimate, extremely serious atmosphere, getting rid of all its trappings, including staging, to only let the truth speak through a transcended Cooper Koch. Doubt is no longer permitted before Javier Bardem comes to remind us what a powerful actor he is an episode later and erases our certainty with a wave of the hand.

The series thus has the intelligence to never really take sides for one version or another and manages to master its nuances to the point of thwarting our reproaches throughout the season. The overacting of the actors? Nicholas Chavez and Cooper Koch prove themselves formidable as soon as the trauma intervenes. The delicate subject of sexual abuse ridiculed? Two confessions will allow it to find its serious tones again. Not everything is perfectly under control in these changes of tone and we would have reduced the duration of some passages, but Monsters has once again appropriated his crime to make a superb story out of it.