Netflix’s biographical thriller Unabomber is now streaming on the platform, chronicling the formative years and eventual arrest of Ted Kaczynski, the titular mail bomber who terrorized the United States from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s. Directed by Janus Metz, the film sets out to understand the origin of a domestic terrorist, but critics have found its execution uneven — praising its Cold War-era Harvard sequences while flagging a manhunt storyline that never quite delivers suspense.
What distinguishes Unabomber from other projects about this notorious criminal — including other projects about this notorious criminal — are the portions set at Harvard University during the Cold War. Unabomber follows teenage Theodore Kaczynski, played by Jacob Tremblay, a brilliant mathematics student who yearns to become a philosopher. There, he participates in a harrowing psychological experiment overseen by Professor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe), whose program is meant to stress-test a person’s philosophical arguments but instead becomes an abusive quest to break a person until they change. The movie suggests Murray ultimately unleashed a monster within Kaczynski who would later target the industrial and academic institutions he blamed for ruining the natural world and robbing humans of liberty. The reality is more complicated
A Manhunt That Falls Short
As FBI Agent Joanne Miller, Shailene Woodley leads the surprisingly inert 1990s portions of the film, chronicling the manhunt for Kaczynski, then a hermit living in the woods of Montana. This storyline strives for serial killer movie suspense, but it never musters enough thrills to overcome its inherent tropes. It reduces the FBI’s capture to a dull TV cop procedural instead of capturing the magnitude of what was a historic win for law enforcement.
While I appreciated Unabomber trying to explore what made Ted Kaczynski a monster, the film is just too slight and undercooked to pass its own philosophical stress test. It also underwhelms in chronicling the FBI’s manhunt for him.
Reviewer
The film’s approach to Murray’s character certainly makes him the heavy of the picture, but Crowe plays him with enough haughtiness to prevent the character from being a complete mad scientist cliché. Like Kaczynski, Murray wants the world to know how brilliant he is — but he may, in fact, just be a big loser. As for Tremblay, the prodigy-era Kaczynski struggles to convey the psychological layers of his damaged character, even as his performance anchors the film’s most ambitious sequences.
Looking Ahead
For viewers on Netflix seeking a more substantive treatment of the subject, critics point to the 2020 documentary Unabomber: In His Own Words as the better choice to stream. The verdict on Metz’s feature remains mixed: while the film’s attempt to dissect what made Ted Kaczynski a monster is respected, the result is too slight and undercooked to pass its own philosophical stress test, and it underwhelms in chronicling the FBI’s manhunt for him.
Join the conversation