After finding success with a new formula in its lurid Jeffrey Dahmer biopic, Ryan Murphy’s Monster returns for a third instalment of its twink-ified serial killer universe. Here, Charlie Hunnam steps into the workboots of the Butcher of Plainfield, Ed Gein, donning a Winnie-the-Pooh voice and lazy eye to deliver the performance of his career.
If Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story took some controversial liberties with the truth, then The Ed Gein Story is altogether off the chain(saw). Examining the killer’s life and legacy through the scope of those he inspired, it blends truth with speculation, fantasy, and straight-up horseshit. What we do know: Ed Gein was a troubled man with serious mommy issues and a thing for digging up corpses and making furniture (among other things) from their bodies. What no-one knows for certain is unfathomably more than that, so Monster is forced to fudge the rest. It helps that Hunnam’s Gein is the ultimate unreliable narrator – being so incapable of separating fantasy from reality that Monster can brush its falsehoods away in the name of artistic license.
What The Ed Gein Story does do is explore his relationships with the women in his life – mother Augusta (Laurie Metcalf) and local girl Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son). When his infirm mum dies, disturbed Ed is suddenly left with a void in his life, and one which can only be filled with delusions from a sick mind. The show builds around the two murders Gein definitely confessed to (distastefully making up a whole romantic relationship with one of them), while beefing up its body count with those he was rumoured to have killed (including a babysitter, played by Addison Raye) and flights of pure fantasy.
This includes the works of fiction which Gein himself inspired – notably Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Re-staging scenes from each is fun, if only for the show’s dedication to making each film-within-a-film look like something purchased from Temu or The Asylum. Still, that’s nothing to the indignities suffered by Anthony Perkins (Joey Pollari), whose life and story is desecrated in the name of drawing a throughline between Ed Gein (a murderer) and a closeted gay man. Still, not even Temu Leatherface is quite so nightmarish as Alfred Hitchcock (a fat-suited Tom Hollander), depicted here as a leering weirdo who inadvertently torpedoed his own career with Psycho.
One person who does emerge from all of this with a pinch of sympathy is, uh, Ed Gein. When it’s not blaming the women in his life for his actions, Monster depicts Gein as basically clueless; an innocent victim of his own upbringing and sick mind. Adding to this is Hunnam’s admittedly accomplished performance, playing the man as a cross between Forrest Gump and Tropic Thunder’s Simple Jack.
It’s an alarming take on the true crime biopic, and one which throws everyone under the bus, from Gein’s victims to the filmmakers he allegedly inspired. In the end, Monster: The Ed Gein Story is insulting to just about everybody except Ed Gein himself.
MONSTER: THE ED GEIN STORY is streaming on Netflix UK now.
