There may be no true-crime rock Netflix has left unturned, but Ted Kaczynski’s story presents a particularly difficult question for a narrative feature: How do you examine the making of a man who killed three people and injured 23 others without turning one chapter of his life into an explanation for everything that followed? “Unabomber,” directed by Janus Metz, chooses the most dramatic chapter it can find. It follows Kaczynski through a series of psychological experiments at Harvard while cutting ahead to the FBI investigation that would eventually lead to his arrest. It sounds like a way to put his past in conversation with his crimes. In practice, the two timelines rarely tell us much more together than they would apart.
Jacob Tremblay plays Kaczynski as a teenage Harvard student in the late 1950s and early ’60s, while Russell Crowe plays Henry Murray, the psychology professor who draws him into his research. The other thread jumps to the mid-1990s, where FBI agent Joanne Miller (Shailene Woodley) works to identify the bomber after the publication of his manifesto. Metz moves between the stories often, though the cuts do little to build tension or make one period illuminate the other. With so little visual distinction or momentum, the film begins to resemble the kind of true-crime dramatization Netflix can produce almost on autopilot.
The Harvard material ought to be the more unsettling half. Murray’s study subjects Kaczynski to confrontational sessions in which his beliefs and personal disclosures are turned against him while researchers observe. Crowe gives Murray a commanding presence, and the imbalance between a celebrated professor and an eager 16-year-old student is troubling enough without any knowledge of what Kaczynski will become. Yet Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves’ script seems so intent on treating these experiments as the key to the Unabomber that it leaves little room to examine the young man taking part in them.
Tremblay, who made such a strong impression opposite Brie Larson in “Room,” has a demanding role, but he spends much of this film pouting, glaring or erupting in anger. Those reactions tell us Kaczynski is suffering; they rarely show us how he processes what is happening to him. The problem goes beyond the performance. The movie keeps pointing to Murray’s study as though proximity to cruelty can account for the long path from a mistreated student to a murderer. It is a compelling premise for a scene, but an awfully neat shape to impose on a life.
Woodley fares better in the investigation, where the publication of Kaczynski’s manifesto in The Washington Post gives Miller and her task force something tangible to pursue. There’s more energy in watching the agents work through a lead, and the hope someone might recognize his writing style, than in waiting for another Harvard scene to underline Kaczynski’s distress. Woodley also brings some welcome human curiosity to a character who could easily have been reduced to a guide through the case files. Ironically, Miller is a composite, yet she feels more fully realized than the actual humans in the movie.
Kaczynski has already been the subject of “Manhunt: Unabomber” and Netflix’s own documentary series “Unabomber: In His Own Words,” so another retelling needs a point of view beyond the shock of its subject. Metz’s film has one, but it presses too hard on the idea that the Harvard experiments explain what came later and does too little to explore the distance between those events. By the end, “Unabomber” has shown us a great deal of anger without getting much closer to understanding it.
UNABOMBER is now streaming on Netflix.