Don't Dream It's Over

"Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story," episode six, "Don't Dream It's Over," directed by Max Winkler, marks a significant tonal and narrative shift within the season. Unlike the searingly intimate and claustrophobic fifth episode, this chapter propels the viewer into a fractured, often surreal landscape of flashbacks, offering the perspectives of José (Javier Bardem) and Kitty Menendez (Chloë Sevigny). Rather than furthering the brothers' trial or aftermath, the episode probes the dysfunctional roots of the Menendez legacy, dramatizing cycles of abuse, betrayal, and denial that reverberate across generations. The result is an unsettling, occasionally jarring interlude that asks more about the making of monsters than the search for justice.

Opening on the tentative beginnings of José and Kitty's relationship, the episode initially sketches their partnership as one filled with ambition and hope. Yet, as their lives entwine, happiness quickly gives way to mutual dissatisfaction and escalating manipulation. We see Kitty's swift transition from a promising career woman to a brittle, anxious homemaker, perennially teetering between anger and despair. Bardem's José is charismatic and obsessive, his drive for success transforming into cruelty, as his need for control eclipses familial harmony. Winkler's cinematic approach uses restless camera movement and disjointed editing to underscore the volatility and psychological fragmentation infecting the Menendez household.

One of the most striking elements of the episode is its refusal to flatten the parents into one-dimensional monsters or simple victims. Kitty's narration-"I hate my kids"-delivered early in the episode, is chilling not for its malice but for its honest exhaustion and self-loathing. Her erratic outbursts, emotional neglect, and increasingly explicit sexualization of the mother-son relationship render her both sympathetic and disturbing. These complexities are matched by Bardem's unnerving embodiment of José, a man haunted by his own traumas and predilections. The episode traverses wild mood swings-bursts of affection, looming violence, passion, and rage-mirroring the psychological chaos inflicted on their sons.

The episode's flashbacks, shifting between holidays, confrontations, and silent car rides, are stitched together with a feverish energy, conjuring a sense of inescapability. Winkler pushes this further with persistent close-ups and shadowy, color-muted production design. The palette is almost funereal, cloaking the Menendez mansion in perpetual dusk and lending even moments of apparent calm an undercurrent of threat. Sound design is sparing and invasive; the slap of a hand, a slammed door, or a whispered insult lands with the weight of a gunshot, foregrounding the unpredictable violence inside the home.

Central scenes build poignantly on the evidence of intergenerational trauma. The episode explicitly alludes to generations of sexual abuse, suggesting that the violence visited upon Erik and Lyle was not an aberration but a sick inheritance. This narrative decision complicates notions of blame and resolution, casting the Menendez saga as a tragedy with no heroes, few innocents, and a legacy of pain that cannot be contained by criminal proceedings alone.

While critics have noted the episode's ambitious structure and the formidable performances from Sevigny and Bardem, some consider "Don't Dream It's Over" a strange, discordant entry. The detour into the parents' point of view, especially after the raw testimony of Erik in the previous episode, unsettles expectations and may disrupt narrative momentum for viewers eager for the trial. However, the episode's stylistic flourishes-its chaotic pacing, broken timeline, and willingness to confront unspeakable acts-mirror the subject matter's discomfort, forcing the audience to engage viscerally with the underlying questions about psychology, responsibility, and the cyclical nature of abuse.

Performance-wise, Sevigny is haunting as a woman unraveling before our eyes, her Kitty oscillating between numbness, hysteria, and moments of wistful longing for days long gone. Bardem, meanwhile, inhabits José with intimidating energy, cunning, and a vulnerability that peeks out only in rare, solitary moments-only to be quickly suppressed. Their dynamic forms the backbone of the episode, foregrounding the chilling reality that before they were parents of murdered sons, they were deeply damaged people themselves.

"Don't Dream It's Over" also resonates within the broader landscape of true crime and family drama, evoking literary and cinematic precursors who have interrogated familial poison and inherited trauma-ranging from Eugene O'Neill's stage works to the more recent cinematic explorations in "American Crime Story" and "Sharp Objects." The episode's depiction of denial, self-destruction, and complicity connects it with a tradition of American storytelling fixated on what festers behind closed doors.

Technically, the editing and cinematography communicate this psychic splintering. The mise-en-scène uses mirrors, doorframes, and windows to fragment the family visually, and recurring motifs of water-dripping, splashing, drowning-underscore both the desire for cleansing and the impossibility of escape. Unlike typical courtroom or procedural episodes, the chronology here is elliptical, inviting viewers to piece together cause and effect, guilt and consequence, memory and myth.

In the climactic sequence, we see the convergence of years of tension as the boys cower on a yacht with their parents, contemplating the murders. Dialogue is sparse, the ocean stretch vast and unknowable, the sense of inevitability suffocating. Winkler closes the episode with the muzzle flash at the Menendez home-replaying the fateful act through the parents' perspective-insisting on the tragedy's circularity and the futility of searching for simple answers.

While episode six may not be the most narratively satisfying or emotionally clear, its boldness lies in ambiguity and discomfort. It stands as the most artistically experimental chapter of the season, using point of view, structure, and performance to forge an uneasy empathy for all involved, without absolution. This creative risk pays off in forcing a reckoning with how monsters are made, not just how they are punished.

Ultimately, "Don't Dream It's Over" broadens the horizons of "Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story," arguing that no single perspective can contain the sprawling tragedy at its heart. It leaves the audience not with judgment, but with irresolution and haunting questions, a testament to the series' refusal to sensationalize or simplify trauma.