The heinous, unforgivable crimes committed by real-life South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh include everything from murder (for which he has already been convicted) and embezzlement (that trial is still ongoing). It seems like there’s been a race by several streaming services and TV channels to provide Murdaugh-related content, and the new Lifetime movie, Murdaugh Murders: The Movie – Part One, is the first scripted dramatization of events involving the family. Bill Pullman plays Alex as a desperate, drug-addicted man of few morals, who does the unthinkable by murdering his wife and son. The biggest problem with the film is the fact that the source material is so dense, filled with so many scenes and criminal activity, that you can’t possibly fit it all in. Here, we get a good, but not great, version of the events that led to Murdaugh’s trial, which is covered in Murdaugh Murders: The Movie – Part Two.
Opening Shot: The film opens with a disclaimer: “While this movie is based on a true story, certain incidents, characters, organizations, timelines, dialogue and names in the story have been fictionalized or altered for dramatic purposes.” Chances are, you’ve probably at least heard of the Murdaugh murders, and this dramatic reenactment of the events surrounding them condenses a lot of the action to fit a tidy timeline.
The Gist: The Murdaugh family has held positions of legal power in South Carolina for decades, but this film begins in 2019 as we meet lawyer Alex Murdaugh, an Oxycontin addict with financial problems, his teenage son Paul (Curtis Tweedie) who seems to be drunk most of the time, and his wife, Maggie (Lauren K. Robek), who is starting to worry that the men in her life are dealing with some deeper issues than she previously knew.
Though Alex is an adult, he lives in the shadow of his imposing father Randolph Murdaugh III, a former district attorney in the state who seems to live in a state of constant disappointment with his son’s family. As such, Murdaugh has essentially become a fraud: he manipulates his business finances, dupes clients out of money, and lies to his loved ones to maintain an illusion of control and success, and this is the story of his downfall.
The film wastes no time depicting Alex as a many with shady business dealings, primarily stealing his clients’ insurance settlements and wiring the funds to his own personal accounts. He knows full well that he’s taking advantage of the vulnerable people who trust him and the insurance companies, but he doesn’t care. Part one of this film also depicts a series of deaths, including that of Gloria Satterfield (Tanja Dixon-Warren), the Murdaugh’s housekeeper, who died from a mysterious fall on the Murdaugh property, and the death of Mallory Beach, a friend of Paul’s who was killed when Paul was driving a boat while intoxicated.
Beach’s death is the real catalyst for Alex Murdaugh’s undoing, because he’s unable to lie his way out of his, and son Paul is held directly responsible. With a lawsuit served by the Beach family against the Murdaughs looming, and with Alex’s finances under intense scrutiny, he becomes a very desperate man. After violently lashing out at Paul for getting the family into a mess that can’t be erased, Paul and Maggie leave Alex and head to the family’s second home, a hunting lodge, and that’s where Alex heads as well, to kill them. The question that the film hasn’t tried to answer yet, and I really hope they do in part two, is, did this man really think he could get away with all of this?
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Max was first to market with their series Low Country: The Murdaugh Dynasty, a docuseries which came out in November 2022 and offers a thorough explanation of the Murdaugh family’s legacy in the South, on top of all of Alex Murdaugh’s crimes. There’s also Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal which came out this past January and provided some context about the entire Murdaugh family’s sordid behavior over the last few years. Those two shows serves offer all the real-life context you need to help flesh out the fictionalized version of the murders here.
Our Take: Murdaugh Murders is Lifetime’s 500th original movie, so it makes sense that they’d want to pull in some star power for such a momentous occasion. Bill Pullman’s folksy but evil-twinged southern drawl is faithful to the real Murdaugh’s speaking voice, but it adds a level of unintentionally distracting camp to his rendering of the character. Drawl aside, Pullman gives a solid performance in a film whose dramatization of events feel rushed and gloss over the human aspect of the murders Alex Murdaugh committed and/or was complicit in.
Murdaugh is pathological, and his crimes and dishonesty spanned years, but in an effort to keep the storytelling tidy, the film reorders the series of events and packages them in a way where everything that happens in a space of about three years. (Hence the disclaimer up top.) While this helps with the storytelling, it does a disservice to the truly disgusting nature of Murdaugh’s existence, a man whose life was a hole he couldn’t dig himself out of. (At one point while watching, I wished that the Coen brothers would have taken a crack at the story, because Alex comes off as a real life Jerry Lundegaard, the character played by William H. Macy in Fargo, whose nice-guy persona covers up his cruel, cunning murder-for-hire schemes.)
Murdaugh Murders is a passable Lifetime movie that’s a part of its Ripped From The Headlines series: perhaps if the headlines hadn’t already told us SO much about the Murdaughs, it might be more intriguing.
Sex and Skin: One scene of rough foreplay between Alex and a mistress is depicted.
Parting Shot: Alex Murdaugh calls 911 in a panic and tells the operator, “My wife and my son have been shot!” He paces and cries, despite the fact that, moments before, we watched him blow them away.
Performance Worth Watching: While Pullman is the real star here and delivers a compelling performance throughout, Curtis Tweedie, who plays Paul Murdaugh, pulls off the almost impossible task of playing someone who is troubled, entitled, and kind of despicable, but allowing us to empathize with him because that’s all behavior he learned from watching his dad.
Memorable Dialogue: “If there’s no body, there’s no crime,” Alex Murdaugh tells his wife when she expresses concern over the disappearance of Mallory Beach. This is a man who knows every legal and moral loophole to get out of sticky situations.
Our Call: STREAM IT. I’m recommending Murdaugh Murders: The Movie – Part One (despite the fact that I can’t stop saying the name of this movie without thinking of 30 Rock‘s The Rural Juror) based on the strength of the performances and the of the absorbing story. But that recommendation comes with some hesitation, simply because there are other documentaries, including those listed above, that do a better and more comprehensive job of explaining the true story behind these crimes.
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.