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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
6
Mixed:
14
Negative:
16
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Critic Reviews
Oct 10, 2025
Season 3 Review:
[Ed Gein] didn’t just kill people; he dug up corpses and turned them into arts and crafts projects. At least he was creative. So, too, is this “Monster“ installment (currently streaming on Netflix) — especially when it artfully mixes the story of Gein, played by Charlie Hunnam as the ultimate damaged mama’s boy, with the fictional monsters he inspired.
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Sep 22, 2022
Season 1 Review:
This is a slow burn that assumes you’re somewhat familiar with this case. Most of the stress in “Episode One” worked for this critic because I knew what was coming. If I didn’t, there’s a chance this somber pacing drift into boring territory instead of being quietly terrifying.
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The IndependentSep 19, 2024
Sep 20, 2024
Season 2 Review:
I don’t think Monsters grapples with its own complicity at all, and it’s much the weaker for that lack of introspection. At least the acting is good? Bardem is terrifying in a performance that’s wildly outsized but offers enough subtlety to position his howling patriarch as both a chilling villain and as a victim himself
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Oct 28, 2022
Season 1 Review:
It’s quite possible that “Dahmer”—despite brilliant performances from Nash, Peters, and the great Richard Jenkins as Dahmer’s father, Lionel—has no real justification for its own existence. If it does, it might lie in the stubborn but elusive promise underlying most true crime: that the perpetrator and his acts can be, to some extent, “explained.” ... The miniseries struggles with this relative lack of explanatory evidence for Dahmer’s depravity, and so it comes up with its own, sticking close to home. It dials up the crazy on Joyce.
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The PlaylistSep 22, 2022
Season 1 Review:
There is almost a conflict between the show’s goals and Peters’: “Dahmer” wants to make him, at times, haunting, a terrifying person whose reason is beyond our understanding, but Peters plays him, very often, as vacant and kind of oafish. This paradox would be compelling, particularly in relation to the way that police basically allowed Dahmer to continue his crimes if the show weren’t so excruciatingly boring.
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IndieWireSep 20, 2024
Season 2 Review:
[Episode five] “The Hurt Man” is a definitive, unflinching perspective. It’s an engrossing 33 minutes — not always for the right reasons, but always maintaining the stark rawness of truth. It’s exactly what’s missing in the rest of “Monsters,” a true crime retelling so obsessed with the same question posed 30 years ago that it loses any perspective of its own.
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The GuardianSep 23, 2024
Sep 20, 2024
Season 2 Review:
Monsters refuses to take a definitive stance on the nature of their relationship and with regard to the brothers’ guilt, it ultimately draws the same conclusion that Dunne does: “Regardless of what happened to them, Lyle and Erik aren’t entitled to our forgiveness.” That may be true. But viewers of this series should be entitled to a more nuanced, less exploitative depiction of the relationship between these two notorious, complicated men.
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Sep 26, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Dahmer has a habit of announcing what kind of show it wants to be instead of actually being that show. ... I can only hope creators will realize there is a way to tell these kinds of stories with more sensitivity and care rather than mere gestures toward sensitivity and care. In the sixth episode, Dahmer does exactly that, but it doesn’t maintain that approach for the entirety of its season. ... It’s admirable that Dahmer wants to honor the victims’ lives and celebrate who Hughes was as a person. But that effort can’t be a complete success in a show that also insists on literally reducing Hughes to a piece of meat.
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The TelegraphSep 22, 2022
RogerEbert.comOct 3, 2025
Season 3 Review:
The idea of making a “Monster” about how violence ripples through pop culture, changing form as it moves, is admirably ambitious, but just out of the reach of writer Ian Brennan and director Max Winkler, who flirt with interesting themes and commentary but are really just more interested in the gross stuff. And there’s so much gross stuff.
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Sep 25, 2024
Season 2 Review:
On the whole, Menendez has little consistent thought about Lyle and Erik. It is attracted to them, annoyed by them. It pants and sneers and shakes its head. Some tonal inconsistency is understandable; how else could a show capture both the ludicrousness of this story and its dire, mortal dimensions? But Brennan and Murphy push past that, into the realm of incoherence.
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Sep 23, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The show comes close to earning its wallow when it turns to focus on Glenda and others, when it shakes its head angrily at the disregard of the Milwaukee police. But far too much of the show is spent standing over Dahmer’s shoulder, watching him in action. It becomes hard to see the show as anything more than lascivious.
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Oct 6, 2025
Season 3 Review:
Narrative chaos and thematic hypocrisies aside, Monster: The Ed Gein Story has some of the same attributes as its predecessors, though it has no single episodes as good as “The Hurt Man” or “Silenced.” It barely has episodes. It does, however, have acting in all-caps and bold-type.
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Sep 27, 2024
Season 2 Review:
A mess in general. .... Murphy’s exploration of this period was very much the inferior one when he produced 2016’s The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, and it’s even worse here. .... Characterization is a nightmare. Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez), in particular, is a cartoonish devil.
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IndieWireOct 6, 2025
Season 3 Review:
It’s far too messy to serve as a compelling antidote for what came before. In the end, it’s just more — and more for the sake of more is the last thing anyone needs. “Ed Gein” seems to know as much, and yet it can’t stop itself from peddling the same sleaze it claims to hate.
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The Daily BeastOct 8, 2025
Season 3 Review:
Hunnam portrays the character with a lurching awkwardness and a tinny, Kermit-esque voice—which the actor says was inspired by a recording of the real-life Gein—which nonetheless never manages to sound authentic. .... At a certain point, Monster’s grotesqueness becomes almost laughably predictable—imagine the most questionably salacious thing that could happen next in any given scene and it will inevitably come true, the camera leering in close-up to capture every perverse detail.
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Oct 7, 2025
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