Monsters has two chief weapons in its arsenal. The first is its suite of actors — Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny as the terrifying José and Kitty, Dallas Roberts as the nebbishy Dr. Oziel, Nicholas Alexander Chavez as the manic and obviously badly damaged Lyle, and especially Cooper Koch as Erik. Koch spends the entire episode on what feels like the verge not just of tears, but a full-fledged nervous breakdown. He holds his face drum taut, his eyes gush water seemingly involuntarily, he trembles as he talks, when he finally gets his confession out it comes in one quick gasp that compresses the words together. It’s his role to offset the American psychoness of Chavez’s Lyle — to be their bleeding heart, even as Lyle’s scheming mind whisks them from one failed attempt at creating an alibi to the next. Koch has to present us with the other side of the brothers; that’s a vital job, and he nails it.
Monsters’ other weapon is a familiar one in Murphy’s arsenal: excess. In the American Crime Story and Monster/s anthologies — all five seasons of which have focused on crimes that communicate some core, dark American values amid a 1990s media circus — he seems to have found the balance that has largely eluded him elsewhere, judiciously deploying moments of camp (Lyle making them play “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” in his mother’s honor at the memorial service; the homoeroticism of the brothers’ relationship) and horror-violence (the hideous massacre of the parents, each of whom took multiple shots, and in Kitty’s case multiple minutes, before dying; Erik’s harrowing dreams of suicide, puling the trigger in which is the only way he can actually sleep) instead of just slathering them all across the screen.
I reviewed the debut of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s new true-crime drama Monsters for Decider.