Was Ted Kaczynski crazy? It seems like you’d have to be to start mailing bombs across the United States, murdering three and injuring nearly two dozen more in a terror campaign that spanned decades.
Of course, the Unabomber, as he’d come to be known, never accepted the characterization that he was mentally ill. That’s important background going into Netflix’s new biopic: a troubled true crime account that’s often insightful but also dangerously simplistic in its retelling of historic events.
Jacob Tremblay, now 19 years old and ages away from his breakout role as the son of a kidnapping victim in “Room,” is the real draw here. But Russell Crowe as Dr. Henry Murray — a professor at Harvard working on a controversial study when Kaczynski was an undergrad — recalls “A Beautiful Mind” with a purpose.
Both Ron Howard’s Best Picture winner from 2001 and director Janus Metz Pedersen’s latest for Netflix examine the inner lives of extraordinarily intelligent men. But “Unabomber” goes too far, inventing a diagnosis for Kaczynski inside Murray’s experiment that turns a seriously disputed criminal and philosophical question into a tidy answer that doesn’t fit the known facts.
Squeezing the wildly complicated life of a truly frightening figure who wanted to dismantle industrial society into a streaming-ready origin story is ironic enough. But fabricating his medical history is almost amusingly reckless considering just how consequential Kaczynski was. Crowe’s “A Beautiful Mind,” in which he portrayed mathematician John Nash, was heavily fictionalized and, at times, pretty ridiculous, too. Critically, however, it was also based on a thoroughly documented schizophrenia diagnosis and did not involve any crimes, let alone an enduring crusade against the structure of society itself.
Kaczynski, on the other hand, spoke to several clinicians after his shocking 1996 arrest and roundly rejected their conclusions that he had any such condition. Instead, the Unabomber maintained his sanity even when mental health evidence might have helped him avoid the death penalty. Other experts disputed that diagnosis as well, suggesting instead that Kacyznski’s symptoms were better explained by a personality disorder. (Notably, his ideas have continued to find an audience: a fact Pedersen’s movie seems unsure how to handle while also actively demonstrating Kacyznski’s capacity for violence.)
That intellect and ambition did indeed bring Kacyznski to Harvard, where Murray’s researchers recruited him for a study that disproportionately commands most of “Unabomber’s” tortured narrative attention. Participants wrote statements of their beliefs and were subjected to a filmed confrontation in which those values came under personal attack. Kaczynski was reportedly chosen in part for his score on a questionnaire measuring alienation, not because anyone had identified him as a budding radical thinker.
Obviously, when you’re dealing with a politically motivated murderer, that deceit offers a lot to dramatize. And Tremblay proves an extraordinarily good fit for the slippery material, delivering monologue after monologue about abstract social concepts with the blood-boiling conviction of a prodigy who, even suffering manufactured duress, is convinced that he is fundamentally right. Crowe, watching from behind one-way glass and turning up in encounters beyond the confines of the study itself, gives that intensity a perfectly legible antagonist, if not always a valid one.
The betrayal Murray inflicts on Tremblay’s Kaczynski is compelling, even as the film presses it into service as an explanation for every horror that followed. “Unabomber” never quite decides whether Ted is crazy, but it has much less trouble showing Murray do things to a student that are plainly wrong. As tender-hearted researcher Christiana Morgan, Annabelle Wallis offers Tremblay a beautiful shoulder to cry on — and even there, her sympathy is ultimately so enveloping that it becomes all too easy to see Kacyznski as a boy steered disastrously off course. Yes, those scenes work emotionally. But they also make the movie’s moral arithmetic suspicious: the more harm we watch the “adults” do to Ted, the less room the feat has to reckon with what he later chose to do to others.
In real life, there is no verified record that Murray’s team diagnosed Kaczynski with schizophrenia, much less told him so at Harvard. The “Unabomber” script nevertheless keeps trying to connect the study from the mid ’70s to its FBI procedural in late ’90s , anchored by a strong showing from Shailene Woodley. Co-writers Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves use Kaczynski’s beliefs to bridge those timelines, drawing a clear line from a teenager defending his worldview to a terrorist demanding an audience for it.
It was really Kaczynski’s writing that helped bring the authority’s years-long manhunt to an end, but the Harvard study wasn’t part of that reveal, at all. The Unabomber’s last package killed California forestry official Gilbert Murray (no relation to the psychologist) in April 1995. Kacyznski then threatened to kill again unless a major newspaper printed his roughly 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” The Washington Post published it that September in an eight-page insert, with the New York Times also sharing portions. Kaczynski’s sister-in-law recognized his ideas in print, his brother compared the manifesto with Ted’s earlier writing, and they reluctantly alerted investigators.
In that sense, the intellectual fingerprints that helped identify Kacyznski are worth examining on their own, but “Unabomber” uses them to imply Murray’s experiment somehow explains what Ted became. The reality is more complicated than that, particularly considering Kacyznski’s writing outlived his arrest.
After the 2017 Discovery series “Manhunt: Unabomber” brought the case back to television, Kaczynski’s anti-technology ideas found a new audience online. That included plenty of young people who had discovered him through the show and its circulation on (you guessed it!) Netflix. They had reason to recognize parts of the Unabomber critique. Technology can erode privacy, concentrate power, damage the environment, and leave people feeling helpless. But none of those observations makes his proposed destruction practically wise — or his murders anything other than murders.
Pretending Kacyznski’s observations were somehow incomprehensible might have given “Unabomber” an easier problem to solve than the one its subject actually presents. And that’s precisely what makes the closing credits so strange. Over real images and audio of Kaczynski, the movie lets the real man speak from behind bars about people treating him as a cult figure even after the killings. Kacyznski says he would prefer to be depicted truthfully, though he is willing to become a symbol for his cause.
Hardly an impartial judge of his own life, the Unabomber’s stated willingness to serve as the face of a revolutionary movement is chilling. Kacyznski died by suicide in 2023, and for many, that means Pedersen’s invented diagnosis will serve as a de facto ending. Still, the question of this killer’s mental health remains a matter of clinical dispute and “Unabomber” misleads where the record does not.
Grade: C+
Netflix’s “Unabomber” begins streaming on September 25.