Get ready to see Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart in a whole new way this September.
The trailer for Lizzie, the hotly-anticipated new film about Lizzie Borden, the woman accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe in 1892, was released on Friday.
The film shows the possible events leading up to the murders and attempts to explore motives for Borden committing the crime. It stars Sevigny as Lizzie Borden and Stewart as Bridget Sullivan, the family’s housemaid who claimed to have witnessed Borden commit the murders. She was also rumored to have had a secret romantic relationship with Borden.
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“So much has been said [about Borden],” Sevigny told HuffPost in January of the film’s creation. “I think that we just really wanted to focus on how she went about finding [her freedom] and how important that was to her and what that meant to her.”
The real-life Borden was tried for the murders and eventually acquitted. The movie is directed by Craig William Macneill and also stars Fiona Shaw as Borden’s stepmother, Jamey Sheridan as her father, and Kim Dickens as her sister.
Lizzie first premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January, but the official trailer revealed the first glimpse of the film for anyone unable to get to Sundance.
The trailer features everything one might expect from a queer reimagining of the famous unsolved axe murder case — splatters of blood, terse standoffs beneath a clothesline, and many, many impassioned glances between Sevigny and Stewart.
It also offers a pretty solid preview of the overall message and tone the movie may be trying to get across. The trailer shows shots of Lizzie experiencing abuse at the hands of her father, and when asked if her father had any known enemies, Lizzie pauses, then responds, “This is America, sir. Every man with a pulse has enemies.”
How prescient!
Lizzie will be released in select theaters on September 14.