Netflix UK TV review: Wormwood
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8David Farnor | On 23, Dec 2017
“Part of the story is the fact that you can’t tell the story,” someone observes partway through Wormwood, and that’s exactly what to expect from Netflix’s new true crime documentary – specifically, what you wouldn’t usually expect from a true crime documentary.
That this boldly experimental play upon the form is by Errol Morris perhaps tells you everything you need to know. The king of documentaries comes with a guarantee of quality, even when he’s moving away from familiar territory. Morris has defined and redefined non-fiction multiple times, from his choice of important, or bizarre, subjects to his signature interview technique, which sees subjects talk straight down the camera as they answer with a raw, immediate honesty. Wormwood, though, is a fantastic departure from the latter – here, his subject is filmed from multiple perspectives, chopping, changing and cutting between each angle in a flurry of thoughts and ideas; a storyteller visibly racing to connect the dots.
The dots in question detail the death of Frank Olson, a biochemist who plummeted to his death in 1953. How and why did he fall from a New York hotel to hit the pavement below? Some said it was an accident. Some said it was foul play. Some said it was suicide. But how does one accidentally jump or fall out of a window? It’s a mystery that has plagued his son, Eric Olson, for years, and even in his old age, he still doesn’t understand what happened. Enter Morris, who begins to piece together the parts of the puzzle.
What he uncovers is a relatively straightforward case involving the CIA and some tests involving LCD, except that nothing about it really straightforward at all. Olson was part of the CIA’s experiments with the new drug, but what they were planning to do, how they aiming to use it, and how exactly his death occurred are as opaque as anything connected to a secret intelligence agency. Morris doesn’t really dig into any solid answers, but after a couple of episodes, it soon becomes clear that he’s not interesting in dispelling the fog: he’s more curious about breathing it in. The more we see with every new instalment, the less we really know – and the less certain we become about the facts that we do have.
That’s partly due to the lack of concrete evidence, something Morris tackle by deploying some dramatic re-enactments. Featuring Peter Saarsgard as Frank, they’re steeped in atmosphere and paranoia, a downbeat, depressed, twisted and disturbing journey into a gloomy, fatal hotel room. There’s a risk in any dramatisation in a documentary that things can seem contrived or faked, but Morris leans into that artificial assumption: relying, at heart, on hearsay and speculation, these reconstructions become meditations on the nature of memory itself, right from a bravura opening sequence that follows Frank out of the window in slow-motion, eschewing any objectivity in favour of jaw-dropping visuals and a knowing soundtrack cue.
Tim Blake Nelson and Bob Balaban join the period segments, adding more to the feeling of watching someone consciously trying to retell events – and cutaways to Laurence Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet (sparked by one brief mention of the play by Eric) only reinforce the bizarre, swirling essence of this hard-to-grasp reality. This LSD documentary is, literally, a trip.
Hamlet, of course, ties in to the film’s title, which may also derive from the book of Revelations, where Wormwood is the name of a star falling to Earth. There are many other meanings the word could refer to, and the six episodes only expand those horizons of possibility as they continue. Part of Eric’s investigation into his father’s death (and his work as a psychology student) involves collage, and Morris does much the same thing, assembling images, newspaper clippings and anything else he comes across to see if they can fit together and make sense. It’s like seeing him empty Eric’s mind on screen, hoping to find something that might bring closure to him, if not make sense to us. People die, memories are lost in a haze, we’re told. The best you can do is determine what’s the most plausible story. In real life, though, stories don’t always have endings, and Wormwood embraces that with an accomplished, challenging flourish. This is dizzying documentary filmmaking from a master of the form – a story about storytelling that, much like Netflix’s Casting JonBenet, deconstructs our obsession with true crime and then puts it back together again into something fascinatingly unknown. It’s one heck of a ride.
Wormwood is available on Netflix UK, as part of an £9.99 monthly subscription.
Wormwood is available on Netflix UK, as part of an £9.99 monthly subscription.