UNABOMBER

Netflix's take on Ted Kaczynski, directed by Janus Metz Pedersen from a script by Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves. It runs two tracks. In 1958, Jacob Tremblay plays Kaczynski as a Harvard sophomore getting fed through Henry Murray's infamous psychological pressure experiments, with Russell Crowe as Murray. In the 1990s, Shailene Woodley plays Joanne Miller, a fictional FBI agent sweating through the manhunt as the manifesto lands and the task force stares at a map. Annabelle Wallis fills out the Harvard half. It's rated R and clocks in at a tight 100 minutes.

Tremblay's good. He plays the Harvard stuff small, inward, bruised, and the camera trusts him with long quiet beats where you can watch a kid decide the people studying him are the enemy. Crowe does the Crowe thing where he glides through a role in low gear and still owns every scene he's in; Murray is a hateful part written as a smug academic sadist, and Crowe plays him with just enough bored civility to make the skin crawl. Metz Pedersen shoots the 1958 timeline like a chilly campus horror movie, wood paneling and cigarette smoke, and that half of the film has an actual pulse. It moves. You won't check your phone during the Harvard scenes.

The other half of the movie is a problem. Woodley's FBI track is a stock procedural with corkboards, red string, and dialogue that sounds like it was ported in from a 1998 pilot nobody picked up. Every time the Harvard story gets interesting, we cut to agents staring at typewriter fonts. The script also wants credit for a thesis about how the system made the monster without actually dramatizing it; Murray's cruelty is laid on so thick it becomes a thumb on the scale, and the manifesto's ideas get summarized rather than reckoned with. There's a hokey, true-crime-styling layer over the whole thing, voiceover included, that keeps undercutting the better instincts of the direction.

If you liked Mindhunter's dim-lit Americana and can tolerate a weaker B-plot for a strong A-plot, you'll stay. Zodiac fans will find this thinner but recognizable. Anyone who came in wanting a serious interrogation of Kaczynski's writing, or a documentary-grade account of the bombings, will be annoyed by episode two of this movie, metaphorically speaking, right about the time Woodley opens the first evidence box. Russell Crowe completists already pressed play.

BACKGROUND TV because the halves don't add up to a movie. The Harvard timeline, by itself, is a sharp 70-minute character piece Metz Pedersen clearly wanted to make. The FBI timeline is filler built to pad it to a runtime and sell a trailer. The result is competent, well-acted, forgettable, exactly the kind of thing you half-watch while folding laundry and still basically follow. On the Lecture Test it mostly passes; it has a point of view about Murray and the ethics of mid-century psych research, but it earns that through Crowe's performance and Tremblay's reactions rather than speeches. The problem isn't preachiness. It's that half this script is on autopilot, and you can feel it.