Jacob Tremblay fails to convince as the young Ted Kaczynski in this piece of Netflix filler, which toggles between a moderately interesting psychological origin story and a conventional procedural about his capture.
The Unabomber may still hold a certain fascination for the public, but that interest is unlikely to carry over to *Unabomber*—a Netflix drama with an unimaginative title and pedestrian execution—chronicling the radicalization and capture of domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski. Janus Metz’s film alternates between a standard procedural thriller dramatizing the FBI’s final year of investigating the case and psychologically revealing flashbacks to Kaczynski’s freshman year at Harvard (at age 16).
Director: Janus Metz
Writers: Sam Chalsen, Nelson Greaves
Stars: Russell Crowe, Shailene Woodley, Jacob Tremblay
While the subject matter is inherently intriguing, the trite dialogue and "true crime" style—executed as if on autopilot—do little to spark the imagination. Furthermore, the two timelines never meaningfully feed into or enrich one another; it is hard to shake the feeling that two separate, half-baked projects about the Unabomber have been forced together.
The more interesting of the two storylines is the one set at university; it satisfies the platform’s seemingly insatiable appetite for killer origin stories—or origin stories for real-life villains, if you prefer—and features a novel casting choice: Jacob Tremblay, the guileless child star of *Room* and *Wonder*, playing the young Kaczynski. Portrayed as a harmless-looking prodigy ill-equipped to navigate the adult world, he squares off against Harvard professor Henry Murray, whose patronizing demeanor masks manipulative intentions as he recruits the vulnerable student for an experimental psychological study.
Murray—played by Russell Crowe, who moves through the film with ease and stands out as its most captivating figure—appears in Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves’s script as the unwitting architect of Kaczynski’s psychosis, as well as the instigator of his relentless bombing campaign against figures in academia. However, the film’s central argument is rather flimsy and does little to counter Kaczynski’s later assertion that the experience, while unpleasant, was not a defining factor in his development. Even so, there is more substance here than in the film’s 1990s-set storyline, which saddles Shailene Woodley with the clichéd role of fictional FBI agent Joanne Miller; she battles institutional sexism and investigative complacency while—quite conveniently—piecing together the Unabomber puzzle on her own.
Indeed, little in this film matches the intensity of *Ted K* (2021)—Tony Stone’s unjustly overlooked biopic starring a genuinely unsettling Sharlto Copley in the lead role. That film worked precisely because it made no attempt to decipher or psychoanalyze Kaczynski in the way *Unabomber* does, with increasingly banal results. While Miller pores over Kaczynski’s famous manifesto and correctly concludes that its linguistic quirks will lead authorities to him, the conclusion of Murray’s study—conducted four decades earlier—is simply that the young Kaczynski shows signs of schizophrenia.
Neither instance amounts to a revelation capable of jolting viewers out of their comfortable slump on the sofa. The story’s most complex nuance lies in the fact that Murray’s study—deeply rooted in his controversial personality theory known as "personology"—was as blatantly unethical as it was fallacious: he recruited the young Kaczynski, among others, to debate his personal philosophies against a deliberately combative and abusive opponent, solely to observe how the unfortunate subject crumbled under pressure. Led by Murray alongside research colleague Christiana Morgan (Annabelle Wallis), the experiment is portrayed as a vile maneuver that casts Kaczynski in the most sympathetic light possible while revealing the roots of his alienation from society.
Consequently, Kaczynski is characterized as little more than a bundle of nervous symptoms; Tremblay plays him with a fragmented, "lost boy" air that never quite rings true. In moments of peak pressure, the performance devolves into a somewhat monotonous display of antisocial stridency—though, in fairness, the script (with its heavy-handed clues and forced connections) calls for little in the way of subtlety.
Metz, the Danish director of *Borg vs. McEnroe* and *All the Old Knives*, directs *Unabomber* in a conventional style: it begins with a completely unnecessary reenactment of the 1994 bombing that claimed the life of Thomas J. Mosser (Michael Buie), a New Jersey advertising executive, followed by an archival recap of Kaczynski’s crimes for the benefit of viewers unfamiliar with the case. It is an introduction lifted straight from the Netflix true-crime documentary playbook—a formula the film follows with a polished finish, yet one that never feels entirely authentic.
Comments
Post a Comment