‘Unabomber’ movie review: Ted Kaczynski’s ‘villain-origin story’ provides weak drama in this cat-and-mouse chase

The American media has taken several approaches to chip into the Unabomber, i.e. Ted Kaczynski’s, facade. Several films and shows have tried to unpack the enigma of Kaczynski’s past. That his intelligence and education eventually led to a series of deadly bombings is incongruous with what America is comfortable labeling as a terrorist. So, even after his death in 2023, Kaczynski continues to inspire artistic inquiries into his life. Janus Metz Pedersen’s Unabomber is the latest, and relatively uninspired, addition to this phenomenon.

A child prodigy in mathematics, Kaczynski was accepted to Harvard University at just 16, and Pedersen bases most of his film around that. Jacob Tremblay plays the teenage Kaczynski, who at Harvard meets the charming Psychology professor, Henry Murray (Russell Crowe), in the late 1950s. Murray invites Kaczynski to be a part of rigorous psychological “studies” that eventually lead to Kaczynski feeling betrayed. Pedersen’s camera also follows another timeline. In the late 1990s, FBI’s Joanne Miller (Shailene Woodley) zeroes in on the Unabomber’s identity. She delves into his family history and traces the forested path to Kaczynski’s reclusive hideout in Montana.

Pedersen doesn’t marry the two narrative strands — Kaczynski’s villain origin story and the cat-and-mouse game that follows —, but he matches the rhythm of both timelines into a slow descent into disaster. However, the film’s writing unnecessarily convolutes what could have been a simple, well-made picturisation.

By his own admission, Kaczynski’s time at Harvard and the psychological experiments didn’t contribute much to the decisions he made later in his life. However, Netflix’s Unabomber embarks on a mission to convince the audience that the Harvard experiments are the key to understanding Kaczynski’s actions. While the makers take big swings thanks to creative freedom, they seem to run out of material to make a convincing-enough argument. The short period Kaczynski spends, as part of these experiments, forms only a fraction of his adult life. The film feels either disinterested or underconfident in following through on the argument it started, leaving the audience wondering how much of his time at Harvard Kaczynski carried further into his life.

Interspersed with a haunting chase in the woods, as the FBI descends upon Kaczynski’s cabin, the film soon becomes predictable.

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Jacob Tremblay and Russell Crowe make most of the limited screen space. Shailene Woodley shoulders the movie’s emotional weight as a fictitious detective. The character is written to fulfill the ‘female detective’ checklist.

Ted Kaczynski’s life has been parsed enough that one can chronologically piece together a timeline of how he went from a mathematical genius to the FBI’s most expensive headache. On this timeline, though, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when Kaczynski “switched.” One can do that with a fictional villain – give him a simple story, and watch the pieces fall into place. It’s difficult to retrofit a real-life human into that template, and that is where Pedersen’s Unabomber loses track of its main character.

Unabomber is available for streaming on Netflix.