The new Netflix documentary doesn’t try to redeem Aileen Wuornos, but it does force viewers to sit with the uncomfortable question: how much of a monster was she, and how much of her was made? By laying out her childhood of abandonment, sexual abuse, and violence alongside the cold details of seven murders, the film refuses to offer easy answers or neat moral lines.

What lingers is not just the brutality of her crimes, but the sense of a life that seemed doomed long before the first shot was fired. Her shifting stories, wild outbursts, and flashes of vulnerability leave a portrait of a woman trapped between victimhood and predation. In revisiting her case, the documentary becomes less about reliving horror and more about confronting the systems, silences, and failures that helped create it — and why her story still haunts America.