Netflix has spent the past few years letting Ryan Murphy dig into the minds of killers, from Jeffery Dahmer to the Menendez Brothers to Lizzie Borden. Now the streamer has turned its eye to Ted Kaczynski, the mathematician who became the Unabomber, with a new movie titled Unabomber. The film follows Kaczynski’s college years at Harvard, where he took part in a brutal psychological study that the movie suggests shaped his anti-tech, anti-academic rage. The problem is that The Hollywood Reporter’s study itself may not have done much to him, according to Kaczynski himself. And the movie’s attempt to connect the dots is thin at best.
The Harvard Experiment
Unabomber, directed by Janus Metz and written by Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves, focuses on Kaczynski’s time at Harvard, where he enrolled at just 16 years old. The movie posits that a study conducted by psychology professor and sometime government operative Henry Murray broke down his philosophical principles, fueling a rage that eventually drove him to murder. Kaczynski has said the study didn’t have much effect on his life. The film ignores that and runs with it anyway.
The 1990s section covers Kaczynski’s capture in Montana. Both halves share a theme: people trying to pry into Kaczynski’s mind and finding only more questions. The 1950s Harvard section shows a boy genius whose intellect, curiosity and naiveté are weaponized against him, hardening his beliefs into ideology. The 1990s section watches ordinary people trying to decipher clues from his manifesto. Neither is particularly convincing.
The Cast and Their Limits
Russell Crowe plays Murray, dusting off his A Beautiful Mind professorial duds for a performance of avuncular appeal masking sinister motives. We’re meant to believe Murray cares for Kaczynski, or at least is impressed by his prowess, but not enough to stop his predatory work. Crowe’s performance is fine, if unremarkable. The portraiture is not detailed beyond that.
Jacob Tremblay plays Kaczynski as a young man. His clean-cut boyish features resemble Kaczynski at that age, but he struggles to evoke the volatility of Kaczynski’s mind. Tremblay’s voice cracks and his eyes widen with alarm, but it reads as bratty and insouciant rather than the beginnings of true menace. He was a better fit for his other recent film about extremism, Sovereign, where his guilelessness served a more poignant purpose.
Gus Halper plays a fellow student who spars with Kaczynski during the study. He did towering work as another collegiate monster in the under-seen 2016 frat-hazing thriller Goat. Had Tremblay and Crowe been given more opportunity to go toe to toe, something in the picture might have caught flame.
Shailene Woodley plays Joanne, an FBI agent hunting Kaczynski in the 1990s section. She does her best to give her character texture, but she has precious little to work with. The filmmakers try to humanize her at the end with a cathartic cry, a moment of solitude processing all she’s experienced. It’s a blatant rip-off of the closing seconds of Zero Dark Thirty, where a dogged investigator finally catches her prey and sheds tears of relief and exhaustion. It doesn’t land the second time around.
What Went Wrong
The investigation arc is boilerplate. An FBI agent places a pile of documents on her desk and says, “Talk to me.” The 1950s portion captures the nervous temper of early Cold War days, as academia worked with government agencies to prepare the country against the perceived Soviet threat. At its best, the film calls to mind Robert De Niro’s unfairly maligned CIA origin story The Good Shepherd, which begins its postwar tale on the leafy quads of Yale.
But the conclusions of that half are just as unpersuasive as everything that happens 40 years later. The writing is starchy and frequently clichéd, and Tremblay’s performance doesn’t help. The movie wants to immerse us in murky psychological depths, but it can’t find the real meaning.
“It has all the markings of a final paper written by a student who got all the dates right, but failed to find the real meaning behind any of the history.”
A Better Film Was Possible
A smarter, more sophisticated version of this story could be startling and revealing, complicating the public idea of Kaczynski as a mere renegade madman. This film serves up only the most basic, obvious version. It tries to be immersive but fails to find the meaning. The result is bland from start to finish.
Unabomber is a missed opportunity. The premise is compelling, and the cast is capable. But the execution is facile and unenlightening. The film trudges through its motions, toggling between grim school daze and a tediously generic FBI manhunt. It fails to deliver on its promise.
The review’s verdict is clear: this is a final paper that got all the dates right but failed to find the meaning.
Source material: “‘Unabomber’ Review: Jacob Tremblay and Russell Crowe in a Facile Rendering of Ted Kaczynski’s College Days,” The Hollywood Reporter.
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