The principality of Monaco exists less as a nation-state and more as a geopolitical curiosity, a sovereign enclave where the density of wealth distorts the very atmosphere. It is a vertical city of glass and concrete clinging to the edge of the Mediterranean, a fortress of tax exemption and surveillance where the camera lens is as ubiquitous as the luxury vehicle. Here, security is the primary export and privacy the most coveted import. It is a place where the social contract is explicit: silence is exchanged for safety, and visibility is managed with the precision of a diamond cutter. Yet, as the upcoming documentary feature soon to stream on Netflix elucidates with chilling precision, no fortress is impregnable when the threat originates from within the walls.
Murder in Monaco, directed by Hodges Usry, is set to arrive on the streaming platform shortly, casting a stark, high-definition light on an event that once threatened to shatter the carefully curated image of the Grimaldi reign. The subject is the death of Edmond Safra, the billionaire banker whose demise in a penthouse inferno at the turn of the millennium remains one of the most grotesque and fascinating episodes in the history of high finance. The film is not merely a recounting of a crime; it is an anthropological study of the paranoia that accompanies immense fortune, a dissection of the “hero syndrome,” and a grim meditation on the vulnerability of the human body, regardless of the billions that insulate it.
Usry, a filmmaker whose previous work has traversed the boundaries of narrative and music video, brings a distinct visual aesthetic to this project. The documentary is constructed as a palimpsest, layering grainy, chaotic archival footage from the night of the fire over pristine, panoramic drone shots of the principality as it stands today. The contrast is intentional and jarring. The Monaco of the present is a sterile, sun-drenched jewel box; the Monaco of the archival tape is a place of smoke, confusion, and flashing blue lights, a moment when the veil of invulnerability was violently torn away. The film operates in the tension between these two realities, asking the viewer to look past the glitz of the yacht show and the Grand Prix to the darker currents that swirl in the harbour.
The Banker of Aleppo and the Architecture of Trust
To comprehend the magnitude of the tragedy, one must first understand the colossus who fell. The documentary dedicates its first act to the meticulous construction of Edmond Safra’s biography, presenting him not just as a wealthy man, but as the last of a dying breed—the private banker as confidant, sovereign, and keeper of secrets. Born in Beirut to a Sephardic Jewish family with roots in Aleppo, Syria, Safra was heir to a banking tradition that predated the modern nation-state. The film sketches his lineage with a reverence that borders on the mythic, describing a world where reputation was the only currency that mattered and where business was conducted in the hushed tones of the souk and the salon.
Safra’s genius, as portrayed in the film, was a preternatural understanding of risk. From his teenage years, where he reportedly amassed a fortune arbitrageing gold sovereigns between European markets, he displayed an instinct for the movement of capital that was almost alchemical. He understood that in a volatile century, the wealthy feared nothing more than instability. His institutions—the Trade Development Bank in Geneva and later the Republic National Bank of New York—were built as bastions of conservatism. The documentary touches upon the famous lore of the Safra banks: the ledgers kept in ancient Arabic script to ensure absolute privacy, a detail that speaks to a worldview shaped by the precariousness of Jewish life in the Middle East.
However, the portrait that emerges is not one of a swaggering tycoon, but of a man increasingly besieged. By the time of the events in question, Safra was in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease. The film does not shy away from the visceral reality of his condition. We see a man who once moved billions with a phone call now unable to move his own limbs without assistance. He required constant nursing care, a rotation of staff that introduced a fatal variable into his obsessively controlled environment. The documentary posits that Safra’s world had shrunk to the dimensions of his penthouse in La Belle Époque, a building that stands as a monument to the grandeur of a bygone era.
This physical decline is juxtaposed against his professional zenith—and exit. Shortly before the fire, Safra had concluded the sale of his banking empire to HSBC. The transaction, valued in the eleven figures ($10.3 billion), was a capitulation to the changing tides of global finance, but it was also a divestment that left him liquid and exposed. The film suggests that for a man who defined himself by his control over capital, this sale was a form of spiritual death that preceded the physical one. He was a king who had abdicated, waiting out his days in a gilded tower, surrounded by security guards who, on the fatal night, would be inexplicably absent or ineffective.
The Green Beret and the Hero Complex
The narrative fulcrum of Murder in Monaco is Ted Maher, the American nurse whose actions are cited as the cause of the catastrophe. Maher is a character of Shakespearean complexity and American banality, a figure who defies the easy categorization of a cold-blooded killer. A former Green Beret who retrained as a neonatal nurse, Maher had been in Safra’s employ for only a few months. The documentary explores the psychological dissonance of his position: a man trained in the arts of war and the nurturing of infants, now serving as a glorified orderly to a dying billionaire in a country where he was a total alien.
The central thesis of the prosecution, and a thread pulled heavily by the documentary, is the theory of “hero syndrome”. The film reconstructs the alleged events with a clinical detachment that makes them all the more harrowing. The narrative is that Maher, feeling marginalized by the hierarchy of the nursing staff and insecure in his employment, hatched a plan to demonstrate his indispensability. He would stage an intrusion, a moment of danger from which he could rescue his employer, thereby earning Safra’s eternal gratitude and a cemented position in the inner circle.
The execution of this plan, as detailed in the film, was a comedy of errors that mutated into a tragedy of horrors. Maher allegedly inflicted knife wounds upon his own body—slashing his abdomen and thigh to simulate a struggle—and then ignited a fire in a wastepaper basket to trigger the alarms. The documentary invites psychologists and criminologists to deconstruct this behavior, painting a picture of a mind operating under a delusion of control. Maher, the expert soldier, failed to account for the physics of fire in a luxury apartment filled with flammable opulence.
The film utilizes reenactments to depict the speed with which the plan disintegrated. The fire did not merely smoke; it roared. The “intruders” Maher claimed to be fighting were phantoms of his own making, yet they became the defining reality for the emergency response. By telling the police that armed men were in the apartment, Maher inadvertently created a hostage situation protocol. The police, fearing a shootout, established a perimeter. The firefighters were held back. The documentary argues that Safra was not killed by the fire alone, but by the lie.
The Bunker and the Asphyxiation
The most agonizing sequence of the film is the reconstruction of the final hours of Edmond Safra and his loyal nurse, Vivian Torrente. The setting is the secure bathroom of the penthouse, a space designed to be a sanctuary against assassins but which became a gas chamber. The documentary emphasizes the tragic irony of Safra’s paranoia. The armoured doors, the reinforced walls, the complex locking mechanisms—all designed to keep threats out—ultimately kept help out and trapped the victims in.
We learn through the testimony of experts and the reading of autopsy reports that death came not from the flames, but from asphyxiation. The film lingers on the timeline, a slow-motion countdown to tragedy. While the police cordoned off the street below, and the fire raged in the salon, Safra and Torrente sat in the darkness of the bathroom, choking on toxic fumes. The documentary reveals the communications that took place—Safra, terrified and convinced by Maher’s story of intruders, refusing to unlock the door even as rescue eventually became possible. He died a prisoner of his own security apparatus.
The death of Vivian Torrente is treated with a solemnity that balances the focus on the billionaire. She is the collateral damage of the narrative, a woman doing her job who was swept up in the psychodrama of her colleague. The film contrasts her loyalty—staying with her patient until the end—with the betrayal represented by Maher. It is a stark reminder of the class dynamics at play: the billionaire, the loyal servant, and the interloper who destroyed them both.
The Shadow of the Bear: The Russian Connection
While the official verdict places the blame on the nurse, Murder in Monaco is keenly aware that the Safra story cannot be told without addressing the geopolitical spectres that haunted his final years. The documentary devotes a substantial portion of its runtime to the “Russian Theory,” a counter-narrative that suggests Maher was either a patsy or a pawn in a much larger game. This section of the film moves from the domestic thriller to the international spy drama, connecting the dots between the penthouse in Monaco and the corridors of the Kremlin.
Safra’s bank had been deeply entrenched in the Russian market during the chaotic, lawless years of the post-Soviet transition. The film details the mechanisms of the bond markets and the lucrative, dangerous game of Russian debt. More critically, it highlights Safra’s cooperation with the FBI regarding a massive money-laundering scandal involving the International Monetary Fund and high-ranking Russian officials. The documentary posits that by assisting Western intelligence, Safra had violated the omertà of the oligarchs.
Interviewees, including investigative journalists and former intelligence officers, speculate on the timing. The fire occurred just as the banking sale was finalizing and the FBI cooperation was intensifying. Was the “botched hero” narrative a convenient cover for a professional hit? The film notes the anomaly of the security guards’ absence that night—a detail that conspiracy theorists seize upon. How could the most protected man in Monaco be left unguarded at the exact moment a fire broke out?
The documentary also draws a line to Hermitage Capital Management, the fund Safra co-founded with Bill Browder. Hermitage would later become the epicenter of the Magnitsky affair, a conflict that defined the modern antagonistic relationship between Russia and the West. By placing Safra in this lineage, the film suggests that his death might have been the opening salvo in a war that is still being fought. While the director does not explicitly endorse the assassination theory, the inclusion of these details creates a shadow of doubt that hangs over the entire narrative.
The Socialite’s Venom
No exploration of a Monaco scandal would be complete without the chorus of the high society that inhabits it, and Murder in Monaco finds its most acerbic voice in Lady Colin Campbell. The socialite and author serves as a Greek chorus of one, providing a commentary that is as biting as it is revealing. Her inclusion in the documentary is a masterstroke of casting, bringing the simmering resentments of the Riviera’s drawing rooms onto the screen.
Lady Campbell’s animosity toward Safra’s widow, Lily, is palpable and given ample screen time. The film delves into the controversy surrounding Campbell’s novel, Empress Bianca, which was widely interpreted as a thinly veiled and unflattering roman à clef about Lily Safra. The book was legally suppressed and pulped, a fact that Campbell recounts with a mixture of defiance and victimization. In the documentary, she refers to the widow with epithets that are shocking in their candor, describing her as a “praying mantis” and casting aspersions on her character that border on the libelous before storming out of the interview in a moment of theatrical rage.
This segment of the film serves a dual purpose. It provides the “tabloid” element that fuels public fascination with the super-rich, but it also exposes the insular, vicious nature of the social circle in which the Safras moved. It depicts a world where alliances are transactional and where tragedy is metabolized as gossip. The documentary does not necessarily validate Campbell’s views, but uses them to texture the environment—a place where everyone is watching everyone else, and where the knives are always out, figuratively if not literally.
The Trial and the Aftermath
The final act of the film covers the legal resolution, such as it was. The trial of Ted Maher is depicted as a swift, almost perfunctory affair, characteristic of a principality that prefers its scandals to be buried quickly. The documentary critiques the Monegasque judicial process, noting the pressure to close the case and restore the image of safety that is the bedrock of the local economy. Maher’s confession—retracted, then reiterated, then retracted again—is scrutinized. Was it the admission of a guilty man, or the capitulation of a bewildered one under duress?
The sentence handed down—a decade in prison—is presented as a compromise that pleased no one. For the conspiracy theorists, it was a cover-up; for the prosecution, it was justice served. The film follows Maher’s journey post-incarceration, including his attempts to clear his name and his publication of a memoir. His current stance, that he was framed and that the intruders were real, is given space, though the weight of the forensic evidence presented earlier makes it a hard sell for the audience.
The documentary also touches on the “prison break” narrative, referencing Maher’s bold, if ultimately futile, attempt to escape custody—a detail that adds another layer of cinematic absurdity to the story. It reinforces the image of Maher as a man living in a movie of his own mind, an action hero in a world that demanded a quiet nurse.
Cinematic Craft and Critical Verdict
Technically, Murder in Monaco is a polished addition to the true-crime genre. The cinematography captures the duality of the setting: the azure serenity of the Mediterranean day and the neon-lit mystery of the Monaco night. The score is appropriately tense, utilizing orchestral swells and violin flourishes to underscore the operatic nature of the tragedy. The director, Hodges Usry, manages to balance the sensational elements with a rigorous adherence to the timeline, preventing the film from sliding into pure exploitation.
However, the film’s greatest strength is its refusal to provide a neat conclusion. It acknowledges that in the intersection of immense wealth, international espionage, and human psychology, the truth is often a kaleidoscope. The official story—the nurse, the fire, the mistake—is plausible, but the alternative—the spies, the mafia, the hit—is seductive. The documentary leaves the viewer in the uncomfortable space between the two, suggesting that in a place like Monaco, the truth is simply whatever version of events the most powerful people agree upon.
The film is a testament to the fact that money can buy the most advanced security systems in the world, but it cannot buy safety from human nature. It portrays Edmond Safra not just as a victim of a fire, but as a casualty of the very world he helped create—a world of secrets, leveraged assets, and transactional relationships. As the credits roll, the image of the Belle Époque penthouse, scorched and blackened against the pristine skyline, serves as a haunting memento mori.
Murder in Monaco is a dense, intricate, and deeply disturbing film that demands attention not just for the crime it investigates, but for the world it reveals. It is a world where the stakes are infinite, and where a single spark can burn down an empire.
Murder in Monaco premieres on Netflix on December 17.
