Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart

The story of Elizabeth Smart, a woman who at the age of 14 was captured by a couple of religious lunatics. She was kept in the woods for 9 months and repeatedly raped and abused, before managing to signal for help and getting away.

This really suffers from the ‘Netflix treatment’ of documentaries. Endless drone shots, over-dramatics, footage of people getting ready for interviews, hyper-zoom-ins on archive images… if you’ve seen one you will know the style. We’re lucky it’s not a six-part mini-series.

It’s a shame because they have an unusual level of access to people involved with the case. Most of the family are included (only Smart’s mother is absent), as are the police and a few other locals.

It’s particularly interesting to try and see the police’s point of view in a case where their tunnel-vision caused issues - they wouldn’t listen to their only eye-witness, the younger sister who very late-on managed to remember whose voice it was she heard. Worse still, they had even arrested the kidnapper for shoplifting at one point, while Smart was in captivity.

The film seems to struggle to tell its story coherently, and frankly the simple timeline on Wikipedia is much more enlightening. Another trademark of the Netflix style is that you are left with more questions than answers. For instance, one of the kidnappers was released in 2018, but it’s just a footnote here. Surely this is a key part of the story, even though it’s 15 years after the events.

A wasted opportunity of a film.