True crime remains a backbone of Netflix’s catalogue. Their strength is volume, giving subscribers more content than they could possibly keep up with. Sadly, history is also full of more gruesome tales than you can keep up with, and fascination with the worst humanity has to offer never fades. So if you turn on Netflix a few times a week, you can always find new true crime movies or series to watch. In that way, Unabomber is just another drop in the bucket. But it’s also one of Netflix’s premier offerings, with a cast of recognizable faces that make it stand out in your wayward scrolling. Russel Crowe? Shailene Woodley? And doesn’t that kid look familiar?
This combo is what’s led Unabomber to top streaming numbers worldwide. It’s tailor-made for online success, and only a true dud would fail in its position. And Unabomber is not a dud, capitalizing on a tragic opening sequence that makes you cringe with anticipation to lock you in. Once started, it’s hard not to finish, even when it falters.
That opening sequence is the murder of Thomas Mosser, who unknowingly opened a package sent by the infamous Unabomber. One minute he’s playing with his kid. The next he’s gone. Shocking, random bombings like this lasted decades, leading to the longest manhunt in FBI history. The film follows both the man and the hunt.
For the man portion, we go to 1950s Harvard, where a young Ted Kaczynski (Jacob Tremblay) takes part in an ethically questionable study headed by Russell Crowe’s Henry Murray. This real-life event is a perfect way to focus on Kaczynski’s psychological makeup, showing the prodigy getting sent to college when he was only a 16-year-old boy and falling under the manipulative spell of Murray. Murray is running one of those messed-up studies that would never pass the review boards today, using personal information to belittle his subjects’ beliefs. Tremblay, who is probably still best known as the kid from Room, utilizes his ability to convey silent thinking to show how Kacynski responds to this. You sense Kacynski’s intelligence and his rage, even when he’s trying to downplay them. Murray is a more straightforward villain, obviously doing something completely unethical and cruel. The film walks a tightrope with this section, implying that the study unveils Kaczynski’s dangerous side. This is almost certainly too simplistic a take, but watching Tremblay stew and snap under the weight of an unethical study when he’s still a boy is unquestionably horrifying.
For the hunt portion, we follow the FBI agents tracking him down in the 1990s. Shailene Woodley plays the fictitious agent Joanne Miller, who buts heads with her superiors and her partner. She thinks analysis of the Unabomber’s manifesto would be key to finding him, but others are in favor of more straightforward investigative methods. But instead of spending time on Miller studying intently and finding hints in the way she’s pushing, they speed up her discoveries and get her into the field. She suspects Kaczynski so quickly that it seems implausible that he’d remained hidden for decades. But still she is not believed, so she goes out into the field to investigate Kaczynski herself. That eye-rolling development is enough to push this section of the film into laughable territory, even when the scenes themselves are pulled off adequately.
The two halves of the film are not only different in subject, but entirely different in quality. The key to making split-focus films work is getting the two sides to sync. In Unabomber, they do not. The closer-to-true-life psychological examination proves far more interesting than the inventive investigation, leaving you tapping your feet whenever you leave the 1950s. Kaczynski was a violent dude, but he’s far more interesting when examined quietly.
So, in the end, this is an oddity for Netflix. Their lower-profile true crime content is consistently satisfying, occasionally even great. Unabomber was clearly going for greatness, but by losing focus on what is unique and interesting about this story, it misses that mark.
Release: now streaming on Netflix
Director: Janus Metz Pedersen
Writer: Sam Chalsen, Nelson Greaves
Cast: Russell Crowe, Jacob Tremblay, Annabelle Wallis, Shailene Woodley
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