‘Unabomber’ Netflix Review: A Fractured Look At Ted Kaczynski’s Harvard Years And FBI Manhunt

Those of us old enough to remember the 1990s carry, tucked away in some dark corner of memory, the figure of the man known as the Unabomber — a character who managed to terrorize an entire country through his extravagant and dangerous method of killing: mailing explosives to his victims. As the film’s opening scene shows, he packed bombs into parcels, sent them through the postal service, and when someone opened one at home, it detonated. He didn’t kill many people — three dead and 23 injured across 16 attacks, all within the United States — and yet his notoriety outlasted the body count. That’s due less to the death toll than to his personality, his motives, and his method.

Plenty of documentaries have already picked apart different facets of his story — he’s a classic figure of the true-crime industrial complex — but there’s also room for fiction films speculating on the parts of his life that remain less examined or less understood. Working across two parallel timelines, Unabomber sets out to tell, on one hand, the supposed origins and traumatic experiences that may have seeded his hatred and resentment, and on the other, the steps that led to his eventual capture. In other words: the crimes themselves are treated as already known, a settled matter, and largely skipped over.

Danish director Janus Metz essentially offers two films stitched into one, cutting between them constantly without much real justification. One strand unfolds in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the other in 1996, by which point the FBI had already spent years hunting this elusive figure. In the past-set thread, we follow Ted Kaczynski — that was his real name; he died in 2023 — through his time at Harvard, where he crossed paths with professor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe), who used him as a guinea pig in a real psychological experiment (the infamous MK-ULTRA program). According to this version of events, that experience planted the frustrations that eventually curdled into attacks aimed, for the most part, at figures of power in science and technology.

An intense, fairly neurotic young man — played by a now-teenage Jacob Tremblay — with sharply defined anarchist and anti-authoritarian leanings, Kaczynski increasingly clashes with Murray and his assistant Christiana Morgan (Annabelle Wallis), who confuse him and, eventually, humiliate him, never taking him as seriously as he believes he deserves. While the experiments were real and Kaczynski genuinely took part in them, many — including the Unabomber himself — have argued they’re far from essential to understanding his political radicalization or the life change that followed: a retreat from civil society into an isolated cabin in Montana, from which he’d send his lethal letters.

That thread is intercut with the efforts — largely fictionalized, since the character didn’t exist as such — of FBI investigator Joanne Miller (Shailene Woodley), who in this version does most of the legwork in cracking the case, convinced the Unabomber isn’t any of the obvious suspects and instead tracking him through his ideological and philosophical fingerprint. That angle kicks in once Kaczynski sends a political manifesto to the media, who publish it, laying bare the ideological motives behind his crimes. Pulling on that thread, Miller eventually reaches the Unabomber’s brother — and the rest is history.

Unabomber is the odd kind of movie that doesn’t really serve any audience well. Those already familiar with the case will see things they already know, mixed with plenty that will likely irritate them given how loosely the film hews to the documented facts. And those unfamiliar with the figure are given a version that strips out much of what matters — not just the crimes, but above all the ideological radicalization that drove him into total isolation, furious at how the technological revolution and industrial progress were destroying both people and the environment.

For those of us who know the story only casually, the film doesn’t offer much to hold our attention either, since its time jumps and its «revelations» never feel particularly consequential. The film gains weight whenever Crowe is on screen, largely through the actor’s commanding presence and charisma, which lend the material a density that tends to evaporate the moment he steps out of frame. Tremblay is a solid actor, but here he mostly registers as a tense, nervous, frustrated teenager, aggrieved by the lack of respect the adults at Harvard show toward ideas he considers innovative and revolutionary. And Woodley can’t work miracles with an FBI agent who feels assembled by an algorithm trained on a dozen similar characters.

There are threads tied to Kaczynski’s life and ideas that the film doesn’t dig into nearly enough — threads that may be more relevant today than the psychological particulars of his crimes or the mechanics of his capture. The film does gesture, in the background, toward the idea that many of the critiques he leveled at the society he lived in — stripped of the horrifying context in which he made them — weren’t entirely without merit, but it never really follows through on that thought. A line like «we’re voluntarily letting technology take over our lives» would likely land with even more force today than it did thirty years ago. Getting inside that unsettling territory of meaning would require a subtler, smarter film than this conventional true-crime also-ran.