Review of Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story

Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of different kinds of content to get outside of my comfort zone. It sucks that I’m a little bit funemployed, a bit of a limbo as I wait for an Indian visa to come through (it’s been over two months—things are looking a little grim), but that means I have more time to explore the content I’ve been wanting to dive more into.

I had no idea that this series had been scheduled on Netflix to release during this time. Despite running a blog that largely focuses on books and movies, I’ve been out of the loop a bit when it comes to new releases. A lot of what I have been doing lately consists of vibes.

So how did I find out about the show? I was sitting around and decided to turn the television on. I opened up Netflix, and there this show was sitting at the top of what people were watching in the United States at the time. I usually don’t watch a lot of true crime when it comes to television, but I saw this was based on a real case.

And because I had nothing else to do at the time, I decided to watch it! It took a few days, but I eventually got through these episodes even when I started getting really tired of what I was watching on the screen.

Note: I was unfamiliar with the case going into this, so I feel like I had an unbiased perspective in that sense watching these events unfold.

Let’s get into the review!

Two brothers brutally kill their parents, then navigate the fallout of what they’ve done.

So this isn’t a spoiler because it happens right in the first episode. We meet our protagonists, Erik and Lyle Menendez, and right in episode one they snap and shoot their parents. They go after their father first, violently shooting him until a shot to the face ends up putting him out of his misery, and as their mother tries to crawl away, they kill her too.

They stage it so they leave the house, and fail to buy a movie ticket for an earlier time as an alibi. Eventually, they make their way back home to their (rather nice) Beverly Hills home, then call the cops screaming. They say they have just come home and found their parents dead, and they’re taking to the station for questioning.

At first they pin it on the mafia, as their father had some shady business connections, and the police run with it at first because what else could have happened here? The brothers get their inheritance, which is pretty stacked because of how their father, José, was a businessman.

The beginning of the end for these two starts when they confess to a psychotherapist. He decides to record their sessions after they get the initial talking of feelings over with, and then one of his patients slash love affair overhears what is happening one day. She becomes afraid that the brothers will come after him, so she moves into the therapist’s house—with his wife and kid.

But when he slights her and kicks her out, effectively ending their relationship, she goes to the police to confess about the evidence. The brothers are arrested, much to their chagrin, and they begin denying that they outright killed their parents. Throughout the course of the series flashbacks are woven into the present day, showing how their father was a domineering subject.

We do see this through the perspectives of the brother, which is a flag to note if you want to be more objective about all of this. There’s a bit of an LGBTQ+ slant that the director and writer is going for throughout this, which I don’t think I’m qualified to comment on as I never followed the original case and don’t know enough about the real-life figures to say anything about it.

Regardless, the brothers come across as pretty unlikable to me throughout the course of the series. Although they hid the murder at first and tried to pin it on the mafia, they spend a chunk of the series trying to map out this narrative that their father was abusive (which probably was true if we’re going off this depiction) and they were sexually abused by him.

Their mother, as they admit early on, was suicidal and deserved to be put out of her misery. Later, they say that she was an accomplice/accessory to the abuse, as she knew about it and did nothing.

Overall Thoughts

One of the highlights for the series for me was the acting itself. The two playing the brothers are quite good at their roles—they’re cocky, hotheaded, and act like they’re not going to get caught originally when committing such a heinous act. Whether their claims were true or not, I don’t think they should have done what they did.

Bardem is the standout for me in the end, too. I’ve never seen him in a role like this, and I felt like he did a good job with the equally hotheaded father who is a loose cannon. I’ve also never seen him in television, and it’s good seeing him try new things outside of the film world.

I don’t know if I liked the structure of the series though. It felt a bit anti-climatic to have the big inciting incident right in the first episode, and while it does define the rest of the series, it becomes more of an event and character study in a way that I didn’t care for as a viewer. I would’ve preferred it right in the middle pacing-wise, but here we are.

I also find it really interesting how media plays a role in the brothers’ story, and how that unfolds in its own narrative arc. The first two episodes set up the arrests, while from there it becomes a bit of a circus for the brothers and everyone involved. Regardless, I found this difficult to get through because of the pacing.

Watch it if you’re interested! Taste is subjective; you might like it more than me, and that’s alright.

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