It's 1978 and Candy Montgomery (Elizabeth Olsen) lives comfortably in a residential neighborhood in a small town in Texas, she has two children and a good husband. She has what women's magazines of the time describe as "the dream life of any woman".

Like the perfect housewife on the covers of those magazines, Candy keeps the house in order, cooks, and bakes cakes. She studies creative writing, is a member of her church choir, participates in community events, and always looks perfectly put together.

Candy has time to clean the house, take her kids to school, prepare meals for her family, and the one she will eat with her lover at a motel. Because she also has time for an affair and to be back home in time for the family dinner.

Her best friend is Betty (Lily Rabe). They are inseparable and go to church together with their respective partners. But one afternoon everything will suddenly change when Candy ends her friend's life by giving her a series of blows with an axe. 41 to be precise.

A real case

The protagonist of the HBO miniseries Love and Death is based on the real woman who was known as 'the axe murderer', and chooses to tell the story from her point of view to try to understand why one day, seemingly out of nowhere, Candy Montgomery decided to act in such a sinister and violent manner.

If she had absolutely everything a woman could desire, what had led the perfect mother, wife, friend, churchgoer, and neighbor of that community to kill in such a gruesome way? "You always want more," her husband tells her at one point in the third episode, as if highlighting "The problem that has no name" that Betty Friedan spoke of. 

Behind and in front of the camera

The screenplay by David E. Kelly, the direction of Lesli Linka Glatter (Homeland), and the performance of the cast is naturalistic and restrained. An choice that fits the collective inability to express emotions that prevailed in the culture of the 70s. 

Jesse Plemons and Lily Rabe, Krysten Ritter, Tom Pelphrey, and Elizabeth Marvel are magnificent in their roles, but the main motivation to watch Love & Death is Elizabeth Olsen. As always, she has a powerful and magnetic presence on screen and captivates with her gaze. She also confronts the viewer with a dilemma, as she humanizes the murderer so much that it will be almost impossible not to take her side instead of the victim's. 

Another series about the same case

In 2022, Jessica Biel (The Sinner) starred in the Hulu miniseries Candy: Murder in Texas, a production created by Nick Antosca (Channel Zero: Candle Cove) and Robin Veith (Mad Men), which is available on Disney+.

*This article has been automatically translated using artificial intelligence