Netflix’s ‘Unknown Number’ Raises Some Troubling Questions

The next put up incorporates spoilers for Unknown Quantity: The Excessive College Catfish.

The #1 film on Netflix at this time isn’t Kpop Demon Hunters or the streaming service’s shiny new adaptation of the best-seller The Thursday Homicide Membership, and even Shrek. (Shrek is presently the #3 film on all of Netflix proper now, by the way in which. That rattling ogre actually is an all-star.)

No, the #1 Netflix film proper now’s a little bit true-crime documentary known as Unknown Quantity: The Excessive College Catfish. When you hear the premise, which seems like a horror film come to life, it’s not onerous to perceive why.

A teen couple from a tiny city in Michigan are focused by an nameless cyber stalker, who sends a whole lot of harassing, vulgar, and even threatening textual content messages over the course of a number of years. The individual sending the textual content seems to be intimately aware of non-public particulars of the couple’s life, suggesting the felony is somebody they know and even love, however each apparent suspect has an alibi. Blocking the offending quantity doesn’t work as a result of the perpetrator is utilizing a messaging app that disguise their id. The native police are baffled. The texts go on and on, even after the couple breaks up.

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The details of the case are already compelling even earlier than you take into account the specifics of the movie, which was directed by Skye Borgman. The manufacturing gained entry to basically each main participant on this tawdry drama, together with the younger man and girl who had been cyber stalked, each their units of fogeys, all the different younger folks they related to, the principal and superintendent of their college, the regulation enforcement officers who investigated the crime, and even a classmate who was suspected of being the perpetrator when preliminary proof pointed in her route. (It turned out she was framed by the precise catfisher.)

The actual-life contributors in these occasions not solely sat down for interviews with Borgman, they reenacted plenty of what befell for her digicam. Unknown Quantity is full of slow-mo sequences in moodily lit bedrooms and highschool hallways the place teenagers and fogeys look warily at their telephones.

Reenactments are nothing new in documentary movies, and whereas they’re usually carried out by actors, it’s not exceptional for a doc’s topics to play themselves on digicam. However I’m not positive I’ve ever seen a doc take the extra step that Unknown Quantity did, which was to have the one that finally confessed to the crimes and pled responsible to 2 counts of stalking a minor — who (once more, spoiler alert) turned out to be Kendra Licari, the mom of the feminine sufferer — actively take part within the creation of the movie, not solely as an interview topic however as one of many performers within the reenactments. 

That’s Licari within the picture above and the one on the high of this text, lounging on a settee at nighttime, apparently recreating one of many moments the place she allegedly despatched her personal daughter one in every of these texts — messages which ranged from insulting her bodily look to telling her to kill herself. Licari’s actions are unfathomable, however the determination to have her actually carry out them for the digicam within the film is sort of as surprising.

From a storytelling perspective, it’s not obscure why Licari was included. If each single individual on this story appeared aside from her, she would emerge as a obvious suspect virtually instantly. As a substitute, the truth that we see her in early scenes talking lovingly about her daughter and their relationship makes it seem to be she couldn’t attainable have been concerned. That, in flip, makes much more mind-boggling when it’s revealed that she was the one who ultimately went to jail. (Licari was launched in August of 2024.)

Talking with Netflix’s personal information outlet Tudum, Borgman had this to say about Licari’s function within the doc….

‘It was a protracted course of with Kendra,’ Borgman recollects of the efforts it took to get her on board, including that she ultimately agreed to the chance to instantly communicate to questions circling across the case. ‘That was interesting to her, [to] sit down and inform her story from her perspective and that Lauryn [could] see her do this. She needed to do it, I believe, for her daughter.’

It might be price noting right here that based on Unknown Quantity, Licari shouldn’t be permitted to satisfy together with her daughter following her launch from jail, the place, once more, she served time for the crime of stalking her personal youngster.

I suppose it’s solely honest to let Licari give her aspect of the story. In interviews, she provides a wide range of defenses and excuses for her actions. At one level, she argues that “plenty of us have in all probability damaged the regulation in some unspecified time in the future or one other and never gotten caught,” and offers the instance of an individual who drives drunk however by no means will get pulled over. In one other, she states that she was “in an terrible place mentally” on the time. She additionally insists that another person despatched the preliminary textual content messages that started the entire episode and that she solely began sending extra of them herself at a later date, a declare others within the documentary deal with with skepticism. Proper earlier than the doc ends, she additionally reveals she was abused as a youngster herself, and that parenting a high-school-age daughter dredged up painful recollections of her personal trauma.

However I’m not positive any of her explanations present any true regret, and the scenes exhibiting Licari recreating unlawful acts add nothing to the movie, definitely not sufficient to justify the thorny moral points raised by doing so. Nothing is clarified by watching Licari peering down at a cellular phone from the shadows — or, for that matter, by having the victims of those crimes relive them on digicam for a mass streaming viewers. The road between training and exploitation will get awfully murky at instances.

The widespread consideration Unknown Quantity is getting has prompted a debate round youngsters’ entry to cell telephones, and the benefit with which these instruments could be used as weapons. That’s an necessary dialog, however I hope in some unspecified time in the future there’s additionally a dialogue round how this film makes use of these folks as effectively, largely within the service of an affordable twist and creating “good tv.” I believe this documentary wants a documentary of its personal. How did this film get made on this manner?