Stream It or Skip It?

Murder in Monaco takes us back to the bizarre circumstances surrounding the deaths of billionaire banker Edmond Safra and his nurse Vivian Torrente in 1999, and this being a Netflix true crime documentary, you press play wondering if it’s going to end up in the streamer’s sensationalist junkpile or its substantially smaller pile of reputable docs. (Note that HBO doesn’t typically face this conundrum.) Director Hodges Usry apparently was in the midst of arranging the usual array of talking heads and archival clips to reiterate an old story when he lucked into some new developments and ended up inserting himself into the film – and the result just left a bad taste in my mouth. 

The Gist: Edmond Safra was one of the world’s richest men in the 1990s, having made billions as a “private banker” for other billionaires and celebrities. He owned multiple swank properties, including a French villa once valued at $500 million and a 10,000 square-foot penthouse in Monaco, a tax-free playground for the megarich. He was married to Lily Safra, a woman with a modest background who yearned to be a famous socialite. He conducted banking with Russian oligarchs until he informed the FBI of their money-laundering schemes – and for that reason, he employed dozens of security guards to keep him safe and assuage his paranoia. He also employed a fleet of nurses to help him manage his Parkinson’s disease. 

Torrente and American ex-Green Beret Ted Maher were working one night when a fire broke out in the Monaco residence. Curiously, his cadre of security guards was off-duty, perhaps because the penthouse was “a fortress” with panic buttons, bulletproof shutters and other security measures. Lily escaped the residence while Edmond and Torrente fled to a panic room, where they ended up suffocating on smoke fumes. Maher claimed that two men broke into the apartment and stabbed him twice, after which he lit a fire in a wastebasket to trigger the fire alarm that would inform authorities, then made his way to an elevator. It took the fire department an unusually lengthy amount of time to turn on the hoses – enough time for Edmond and Torrente to perish.

Those are the broad strokes. There are many moving parts to this story, told via Usry’s interviews with Maher, head nurse Sonia Herkrath, New York Post reporter Isabel Vincent, Edmond’s banking liaison Bill Browder, nutty aristocrat Lady Colin Campbell, a couple of slippery lawyers, Maher’s former prison cellmate Luigi and others. Yes, Maher’s former prison cellmate Luigi, who helped Maher saw through the bars and escape, after Maher was convicted of the arson deaths. See, the story is, he wanted to impress his rich and influential employer, so he staged the fire and stabbed himself (!) in order to save Edmond and be a hero. Insane. But plausible?

He pushes back against that, though, pointing at the numerous unusual circumstances surrounding the incident, which Usry indulges: Edmond had run afoul of the Russian mafia, who had motive to kill him. Lily has a history of ruthless social climbing, including a couple of dead, very rich ex-husbands, billions in inherited wealth, curiously altered wills, etc. The insinuation that the city of Monaco was motivated to whitewash the deaths in order to reassure its moneyed residents that it’s a safe place to live, Maher insisting they forced him to sign a confession that he couldn’t read because it was printed in French and that his trial was rigged. I dunno if his little prison escape – short-lived, by the way – helps or hinders his story, but it might just tell us a little something about him, though. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Murder in Monaco has about as much journalistic integrity as gossipy freakshow Tiger King. Netflix released the infinitely more credible crime doc The Perfect Neighbor recently – go watch that instead.

Performance Worth Watching: Usry tends to set up the camera and let his talking heads perform, especially haughty-voiced highly practiced eccentric Lady Colin Campbell and Luigi the very dramatically cigarette-smoking ex-con. I dunno if they’re “worth watching,” or worth listening to even, but they stand out like the weirdos they’re trying so very hard to be. 

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: A little external research – like this basic-ass Yahoo piece – reveals that Usry uses Murder in Monaco to pose questions that in all likelihood don’t need to be asked. Without spoiling a documentary that you probably shouldn’t waste your time watching anyway, the director’s essentially just giving a serial liar an elevated platform so they can further spread their bullshit. This is manipulative at best and irresponsible at worst, and Usry uses late-breaking developments in the story (which you can read on Wikipedia, which will spoil a documentary you probably shouldn’t waste your time watching anyway) to insert himself into the film for no apparent reason. Perhaps he just wants to show himself shooting selfie video while fielding phone calls in his home with his shirt unbuttoned? Must’ve been a hot day. 

The truth of what most likely occurred the night of Edmond and Torrente’s deaths may be extraordinary, and an act of nothing less than insanity, but it’s far more plausible outside the confines of the documentary and its shameless assemblage of red herrings. Red herrings that create a fairly fascinating skein of conspiratorial implications that feel like a little more than mere coincidence, but the reasonable conclusion is either the Occam’s Razor simplest-explanation-is-true approach, or that there’s unspoken developments lurking in the shadows of some murky motives that are underexplored here. Either way, Murder in Monaco is sensationalist, journalistically sloppy junk that needlessly muddies the waters of truth and futzes with timelines for the sake of its own dramatic reveals. 

Our Call: Slop city. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.