The Legend of Lizzie Borden

In The Legend of Lizzie Borden, Elizabeth Montgomery’s Lizzie moves through the Borden house with a calm that feels all the more unsettling for its restraint. The film’s most charged image comes in the climactic reconstruction: Lizzie seals the house off, then reaches beneath her mattress for a steel grey and natural wood hatchet. It is a plain object, almost stubbornly so, and that makes the moment harder to shake. The detail lands with the chill of something handled once, then remembered for years.