‘The Plastic Detox’ Review: A Disturbing Investigation Into the Health Effects of Microplastics (Netflix)

This striking documentary about microplastics — more because of what it reveals than how it reveals it — divides its narrative into two distinct threads and formats. On one hand, it plays like a kind of reality experiment in which epidemiologist Shanna Swan conducts a study with six couples who want to have children but haven’t been able to conceive, testing whether their fertility issues might be linked to exposure to microplastics: the tiny particles that break off from plastic surfaces, enter our bodies, and disrupt our hormones. On the other hand, it works as a more traditional, wide-ranging documentary that explains the many health problems linked to the consumption and exposure to these molecules, including a wide array of diseases.

Swan, a leading specialist in the field with books and numerous scientific papers to her name, spends much of the film explaining how many everyday objects contain microplastics that end up entering our bodies without us even noticing. Practically everything around us: clothing, cleaning products, cookware, food packaging, and countless other ordinary objects. In the documentary’s more experimental strand, Swan launches a preliminary study — not a fully rigorous scientific trial but more of a test run designed to pave the way for a more methodologically formal study later on. She recruits six couples who, despite having no obvious medical reason, have been unable to conceive. For ninety days, they attempt to eliminate as many sources of microplastics from their lives as possible to see whether their hormone levels and fertility indicators improve.

Running alongside the couples’ experiences, The Plastic Detox constructs a broader historical narrative about the relationship between corporations and plastics: the industry’s broken promises, the limited success of recycling, the environmental damage inflicted on specific communities across the United States, and the legal battles and grassroots campaigns launched to hold polluting companies accountable. These sections are interspersed with relatively accessible scientific explanations of what microplastic ingestion can do to the human body. The range of potential consequences is wide — from cancer to the rather alarming possibility of reduced penis size, among other things. The film also introduces several entrepreneurs developing companies focused on producing clothing and other goods without plastic-derived materials.

At times the documentary can feel overwhelming, but it’s difficult to argue with its necessity. At the very least, it raises awareness about the invisible risks surrounding us in daily life. Plastic shampoo bottles, deodorants and their chemical ingredients, laundry detergents, toothbrushes, food wrapped in plastic, store receipts, disposable cutlery, packaging — the list goes on and on. The Plastic Detox is less concerned with the environmental devastation caused by plastic (though the images of massive waste dumps are unsettling enough) than with the ways petrochemical derivatives enter the human body and potentially trigger serious diseases.

That more conventional documentary thread — the investigative and explanatory one, which Swan also contributes to through her conversations with the couples — ultimately works best. The couples’ attempts to conceive function mainly as an emotional hook, inviting viewers to follow their struggles and hopes as they try to become parents. And the emotional payoff does arrive. Still, it creates a connection that is more personal and intimate than broadly analytical. Judging by the results shown here, however, the film suggests something rather striking: simply reducing our unintended consumption of those ubiquitous microplastics might improve our lives more than we realize.