On Aug. 20, 1989, Lyle and Erik Menendez brutally murdered their parents, firing so many shots into them—to the point that Lyle returned to his car to reload his weapon—that their bodies were more or less mutilated.

That crime is at the center of Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, the second installment in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix anthology series (following Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story), and so too are competing theories about why they did the heinous deed. Lyle and Erik claimed they had acted in response to lifelong sexual abuse at the hands of their father, as well as a fear of imminent death. Prosecutors, meanwhile, argued that their motivation was simple greed, as the boys coveted the enormous inheritance their father was set to deny them.

Murphy’s nine-episode show, though, posits an even juicier explanation: The boys wanted to slay their parents to keep secret the fact that they were engaged in an incestuous sexual relationship with each other.

Frequently scored to the sounds of Milli Vanilli, Lyle’s (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) favorite band, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (out now) is trademark Murphy, at once in-depth and superficial, incisive and outlandish. It’s also, predictably, flashy, highlighted by a fifth episode that’s comprised of a single, unbroken 33-minute take—the camera zooming ever-so-slowly into close-up—in which Erik (Cooper Koch) recounts, in explicit detail, the torment inflicted upon him by his dad José (Javier Bardem) and ignored by his mother Kitty (Chloë Sevigny).

Cooper Koch and Nicholas Chavez

However, lest that make it sound........

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