The title of Pawel Pawlikowski’s extraordinary, compact drama Fatherland has a double meaning. In this somewhat fictionalized story of Thomas Mann’s brief 1949 visit to Germany, the Nobel Prize-winning author, after having lived in exile in California for 16 years, is challenged with finding his mooring in a country he can no longer call home; if it’s his fatherland, it long ago turned its back on him and his ideals. But fatherland can also be a state of mind where fathers live, a state both more specific and more elusive than fatherhood. In Pawlikowski’s telling of this portion of Mann’s story, it’s during this trip that Mann learns of the death of his son, Klaus—also a writer, though not as successful as his father—by suicide. If the elder Mann feels any emotion when he hears this news, it’s frozen inside him, a bubble of feeling isolated on its own ice floe. Fatherland, so secure in its rigid borders, is a cold, cold place.

Mann’s freedom from this interior island prison happens in the film’s last five minutes, a wordless reckoning that’s as quietly moving as anything you’ll see at the movies this year. But that moment wouldn’t hold so much power if Pawlikowski—with the help of his cowriter, Hendrik Handloegten—weren’t so skilled at sketching in the feathery details leading up to it. Pawlikowski is also the director of the 2013 Ida, as well 2018’s Cold War, pictures that, like this one, deftly balance postwar Eastern Bloc realities with the truth that all humans strive for connection and belonging. These aren’t dour movies, but serious, lustrous ones, less “political” pictures than movies about people trying to sort out what living really means.

At the beginning of Fatherland, no one—not even the aged Mann, played here in a quietly extraordinary performance by Hanns Zischler—has figured that out. The movie opens with a long-distance phone call: Mann’s semi-estranged son Klaus (August Diehl), living in Cannes and clearly in emotional distress, has reached out to his sister Erika—we’ll later realize it’s Sandra Hüller’s voice we hear on the other end of the line. Erika, an actress, writer, and onetime race-car driver, has become her father’s assistant, and she now urges Klaus to join her and their father on the trip they’re about to undertake, from California to the “new” barely postwar Germany. In the year of Goethe’s 200^th birthday, Mann will be accepting two awards, one in Frankfurt, in the West, the other in the East, in Weimar: his justification is that his literary idol was born in one city and died in the other, though it’s obvious that Goethe couldn’t have imagined that chasm that would open between the two within 200 years' time.

Both cities are in transition, and in crisis, though neither wants to admit as much. In Frankfurt, a gray city crumbling at the corners and still finding its footing after the war, though somehow doing its best to pretend all is well, Mann and Erika are greeted by the mayor and hustled off to a press conference. There, the esteemed man himself answers the respectful but probing questions of journalists. Once they learn that he’ll also be traveling to the East, it’s not lost on them that doing so could make him a target at home in the States, where anti-Communist storm clouds have long been gathering. And there are other, more spiritual questions for him to consider. An American journalist, a woman who, it turns out, is an old friend of Erika’s and possibly a former lover (she’s played by Anna Madeley), asks him where he feels his true home is, now that he’s an American citizen. His answer is courtly but honest. He may live in the United States, he says, “but where my Heimat is, my home, is a much more difficult question.” He’s a man between states, both literally and figuratively.

In Weimar, the chief way to welcome a returning hero is apparently to greet him with a somber folk song sung by a choir dressed in dark clothing; at one point, he’s serenaded by a group of children singing the then-newly pened East German national anthem. Mann accepts it all gracefully, but there’s also something a bit quizzical and lost in his expression. He’s jarred by one alarming moment: a wild-eyed man appears at the hotel suite where he and Erika are staying, begging him to reveal in his speech that the nearby former concentration camp Buchenwald is now being used as a detention center for political prisoners. The man is whisked way by officials before he can finish his spiel, though it’s doubtful any of it has swayed Mann at all. In both the East and West, when it’s time to address the audiences who have eagerly gathered to hear his thoughts, he gives heartfelt speeches, anchored in the legacy of Goethe, about the power of art to transform and sustain not just individuals, but whole nations. He seems to truly believe, as he says at one point, that art doesn’t recognize borders—or at least, he truly wants to believe it.

Through all of this, Hüller’s Erika serves her father dutifully. When necessary, she translates his responses to journalists into fluid French; she attends cocktail parties in his honor, even when it means suffering the indignity of running into an oily, traitorous, Nazi-loving ex-husband she’d rather forget forever; she drives her father through the countryside, and though we can’t see her face as she does so, we wonder if this particular task gives her some joy, given her car-racing past. But through it all, because Hüller is such a subtly expressive actor, almost gossamer in the ways she shifts moods, we see the ways in which her resentments toward her father can’t help simmering to the surface. When she learns of her beloved brother’s death, her composure doesn’t crumple visibly—only somehow we know her emotional reserves are folding in and flattening like a house of cards. And when she sees how little this event seems to trouble her father, she can barely go through the motions of helping him on his mission, which, as he seems to envision it, is to save his homeland with his lofty views on art.

How these two find their way back to one another, and to a place of acknowledged and shared grief, is a kind of unspoken miracle that unfolds in last 15 minutes or so of this elegant, remarkably economical movie. Artistically and emotionally, Fatherland accomplishes more in its 82-minute runtime than any two-hour-plus movie released this year. Cinematographer Lukasz Zal, who also shot Ida and Cold War, renders Fatherland in the same satiny black and white, as well as the same serenely squarish, or Academy, aspect ratio. Every frame is spare, elegant, intimate, and the film moves along so gracefully that you’re barely prepared for how exhilarating, and how quietly devastating, its final moment is. At one point, Hüller’s Erika tells her father that Klaus had once said he felt Bach made him feel life was worth living. Her father shrugs that information off, but the final moments of Fatherland—incorporating a serendipitous conjuring, like a specter, of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”—bring it back to him. Can a person have more than one Heimat? Or can that place of spiritual belonging shift over time? Perhaps Bach had the answer. Perhaps he put it in a piece of music, for us to find when we most need it, in a church or even in a movie.

From the Palme d’Or-winning abortion drama 4 Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days (2007), to the institutional corruption-themed Graduation (2016) and beyond, Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu’s body of work has always concerned itself with the human cost of systemic oppression and bureaucratic faultlines. With the searing legal and familial drama Fjord, which earned Mungiu his second Palme at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival in May, the filmmaker once again brings his signature sense of slow-burning tension to the clash between individual and societal codes of morality. Except this time, he shrewdly flips the script. With the story of a religious immigrant family of seven facing an uphill battle against Norway’s child protection services (known as Barnevernet), Fjord dares to imagine a scenario where well-intentioned progressive values can backfire as severely as rigidly conservative ones if they disregard basic human principles like empathy, compassion, and respect.

Written by Mungiu, Fjord follows Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, a Romanian engineer and Norwegian nurse played by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, respectively. Set in their modest ways, the couple tries to settle into their lives in Norway, having moved there after the death of Mihai’s parents to be closer to Lisbet’s family. Raising their five children with a conservative ethos, they don’t quite mesh with the liberal community that surrounds them. But their eager kids still build close friendships with the children of their progressive neighbors, Mats and Mia Halberg, a development that further underscores the two families’—and consequently, the two belief systems’—political and practical differences.

Tensions rise in town when the kids’ school raises child-abuse allegations against the Gheorghius after teachers notice some mysterious bruising on one of their kids. While the film never spells out their precise origins, Barnevernet steps in at once, separating their five kids (including a baby, still breastfeeding) from Mihai and Lisbet, placing them in foster care after the couple admits to some physical discipline that would be considered mild in Mihai’s culture, but is against the law in Norway. Claiming that they are being harshly discriminated against due to their religion and conservative beliefs,  the couple asks help from Mia, an attorney, to represent their case in the Norwegian court.

The real court case that loosely inspired Fjord

Joining TIME on Zoom recently, Mungiu emphasizes that “the film is fictional. It’s not a reenactment associated with any one particular case.” Still, there were a number of real-life court cases that intrigued him as a storyteller with a journalism background. Chief among them was that of the Bodnariu family, who occupied international headlines for several months after they were separated from their five children in November 2015. Pentecostal parents Ruth and Marius were accused of domestic violence, with worldwide protests criticizing what dissenters called harsh and hasty steps taken by Norwegian social workers without proper evidence. In Romania, one of the indirect results of the wildly popular case went as far as a constitutional referendum in 2018 that aimed to alter the definition of a traditional family and prevent same-sex marriages. (The referendum eventually failed due to low turnout.)

“So you couldn’t avoid the Bodnariu case,” recalls Mungiu. He followed the story as it remained in the papers, and during that time and the years that followed, Mungiu began to notice other cases that displayed a similar pattern. “Whenever there was this encounter between, let's say, families coming to Scandinavia from more conservative parts of the world, there was a cultural clash.” What eventually convinced him to pursue the topic through a film was a recent-enough realization that the world somehow became more illiberal than it used to be. “I thought that through this story, I could talk about the [confrontational] state of the world today. People are not listening to the other group. I hope that the world can be a bit more rational than this.”

Upon deciding to write Fjord, Mungiu read everything he could online, moving to Norway for several extended periods to investigate the country’s child-protection laws and relevant cases on the ground. His process involved talking to several families involved with child protection cases and their relatives, as well as journalists who covered cases like the Bodnarius’, court interpreters, police officers, NGO representatives, and various different religious groups. “Finally, I talked to Barnevernet about these cases in general,” he adds. “They were willing to also give details about how things have changed.”

One key tool Mungiu didn’t have access to was the recording and transcription of the Bodnariu trial, which is among the reasons why Fjord had to be largely fictional. “Norwegian authorities said only the family could have access to the recording if they came over. But the family knew that they couldn’t come over. Because if they did, they could be arrested,” he explains. “The family was trying to get their justice in the European Court of Justice, but they first had to utilize all the legal procedures [in Norway]. And because they left Norway before having a final decision about their proceedings, they couldn't get a positive answer from the European Court of Justice.”

The audience is on trial too

Mungiu draws a direct connection between Fjord and his previous film, R.M.N. “In that film, I was trying to investigate how a conservative society reacts when someone who’s different from them comes into their world. We know that they’re not very welcoming or willing to accept differences. They don't understand that there's a bigger world out there. In Fjord, I really wanted to reverse this paradigm and to understand what happens when the conservatives are the minority in a progressive, liberal society.” According to Mungiu, we might expect that type of society to be more empathetic and inclusive, treating minorities with more compassion. But through his investigations, he got the sense that whoever’s in the majority feels entitled to impose their own point of view onto others. “This is not a good example that we wish to set for the conservative part of the society,” Mungiu reflects. “We shouldn't be behaving the same way they behave.”

On these grounds, the central question of Fjord is whether anyone can be truly objective toward people whose values they don’t share. The Gheorghius’ conservatism, for example, means they oppose same-sex marriage. So can viewers both disagree with the couple on those grounds, while also feel that they are being treated unfairly by Barnevernet?   It is a challenge that is essentially at the heart of the American justice system, which asks potential jurors to set all their biases aside and only assess the case in hand through proven facts. “I noticed that saying, ‘I'm here to [only] judge if they are guilty of what they are charged with’ isn’t easy, because you are biased by your own point of view of the world. But I hope that this is what the audience is going to do. The reason why I wanted to tell this story from this neutral perspective is that it is a rare opportunity of inviting not just one bubble that you sympathize with in your regular life. The other bubble exists and dialogue is needed to make the society a little bit more peaceful again. So I took this position of a mediator, if you will.”

A visual style in service of the film’s thesis

To accentuate the connection between Fjord’s searching themes and lean visuals, Mungiu purposefully embraced long shots and continuous takes beginning during the scripting phase, in order to fully immerse the audience in the conflicting world of the characters in a neutral fashion. Indicating that he avoids many of the mainstream filmmaking methods that he finds manipulative, “I don't use anything [distracting] within the scene,” Mungiu says. “I don't use coverage. I don't use music. I don't have funny angles. The camera doesn't move unless it follows a movement in the shot. I try to do this in a sober way, just with the actors and their emotions. I think it's a respectful way of telling the audience, ‘You are adults like we are, you are as smart as I am, so feel free to see [for yourself] what's more important in this shot, or who the main character is.’”

Similarly, he carefully scouted locations in sync with his ideas around isolation and lack of communication. “It was important for us to set this story in a small community, with two houses at the end of this fjord in a lovely but somehow curled world,” he explains. “It’s very majestic, and [it’s a location where] people will have to talk to one another eventually because there's nobody else around.”

He remembers an anecdote about the real inhabitants of the two houses he uses in the film for the Gheorghius and Halbergs, who were in fact not communicating with one another. That all changed shortly after the production convinced one of them to allow the film crew to shoot in his house. Mungiu recalls the homeowner saying, “I will let you, but my neighbor is very grumpy. He hasn’t talked to me in the 10 years that we have been neighbors, so you are going to have problems with him." But when the crew contacted the owner of the other house, they found that he was quite open-minded. “We asked him, ‘Do you have a conflict with your neighbor?’ He said, ‘No, but none of us have started a conversation, so I let him enjoy his privacy.’ At the end, they were communicating normally, and we had a very good relationship with both of them.”

Can a person ever really be fully objective?

No matter how neutral Mungiu tried to stay throughout his research process, there were some moments that made him face his own biases. “I went [to Norway] with this idea that I will meet a society that is not at all religious. This is the idea that we project onto the Protestant north.” As such, he was surprised to notice deeply rooted religious leanings there, especially among older people with a connection to the Norwegian church. He also learned about the younger population’s attraction to new neo-cult movements. “I watched at least a couple of documentaries about this phenomenon. People are really worried that the younger generations are [drawn to] these new cults. So I noticed that the people there are just as inclined to have religious beliefs as any other.”

With this discovery, Mungiu eventually eliminated various scenes in Fjord which would have insinuated that Norwegian people saw the world in a more rational way only because they weren’t religious. “Making decisions on rational grounds is of course a very good thing to do,” Mungiu explains. “But [there is also] this need of belonging to something bigger than just [rationality] that we all feel. Some people still long for the discomfort that there's something bigger than them. And as long as this belief places them on the right side of the world through [tolerance] and [inclusivity], I think we should be tolerant to it.”

“You shouldn't answer radicalization with radicalization”

His time in Norway also led Mungiu to learn more about the Sami people. “I didn’t know much about them before, but the Sami population sets a good [historical] example about how bigger communities and countries were not acting in an ethical way towards minorities. You can see this in the U.S. as well, [in the way] Native Americans were treated,” he adds. “And I think that we should learn from this [that] maybe this ‘we want to civilize you’ idea is not the most ethical one,” he reflects, clarifying that while everyone should obey the laws and respect the culture of the country they live in, real integration cannot happen by enforcing one’s own values onto others. “That won't change [the way] someone thinks. You will just frustrate them, [reinforcing] that there is a hypocrisy in the world.”

Mungiu cautions against the ongoing ideological war that he says is moving in the wrong direction across the globe. “I don't want to be preachy, but hopefully there's something that stays with you after you watch a film like Fjord,” he reflects. “I took the risk of talking about things that people need to listen to even if they’re not nice. Don't kill the messenger. It's time to start to have a dialogue and this is what cinema can do.”

This article discusses the full third season of Nobody Wants This.

Joanne and Noah are going to make it. Two seasons of so many highs and lows, will-theys and won’t-theys, makeups and breakups had gotten a bit repetitive. So it comes as a relief that Season 3 of the Netflix romantic comedy Nobody Wants This all but guarantees us Kristen Bell’s formerly secular sex podcaster and Adam Brody’s hot rabbi will live happily ever after. With Joanne taking conversion classes, the couple checks off commitment milestones in quick succession: cohabitation, then engagement, and, in the finale, an unplanned exchange of wedding vows after the bride emerges, officially Jewish, from an ocean mikvah. It’s a lovely, duly earned culmination of their interfaith courtship. But it raises the question of where the show can go from here. 

The season’s other main storyline—and sole substantive source of conflict—suggests that creator Erin Foster and her co-showrunners, Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan, are staking its future on the relationship between Joanne’s erratic, underachieving sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe), and Noah’s eccentric, underachieving brother, Sasha (Timothy Simons). Morgan is fresh off her latest ill-advised romance, an ethically dubious relationship with her ex-therapist (Arian Moayed) that imploded at their engagement party. Sasha is separating from his wife, Jackie Tohn’s Esther. (This is her choice, probably because writers remain sensitive following complaints about the portrayal of Jewish women in the first season and wanted to avoid making hot, blonde Morgan the cause of the split.) And so the best buddies, who’ve been flirting since Season 1, are finally single at the same time. But is it actually a good idea for the show to bring them together, as it briefly does in the second half of this season? I’m of two minds about that.

What the Morgan-Sasha romance has going for it is the unlikely, off-kilter yet undeniable chemistry between Lupe and Simons, which has somehow surpassed even the electric connection of Bell and Brody’s soulmates. (Let’s take a second to appreciate the versatility of Simons, whose other great performance was as Veep’s toxic West Wing staffer Jonah, a character who would never be attractive to anyone.) Morgan is a brash, blunt, benignly self-absorbed icon in her own mind who also, in her darker moments, fears she’ll never get her life together. Awkward, self-deprecating Sasha is genuinely dazzled by her. For a guy who sacrificed his youth to marriage and fatherhood, she represents all the fun he never got to have. And because they’ve never seemed like viable partners for each other, they have a better rapport than either could manage on a date with someone who’s more their type. “Act the way you act with me,” Morgan advises Sasha as he apprehensively delves into the apps. “You should pretend that you’re talking to me every time you talk to anyone, because I bring out the most charming side of you.” She’s conceited, as usual, but she also happens to be right.

The most refreshing aspect of their friendship is their mutual honesty. So it was clever of Foster, Konner, and Kaplan to make that the driver of their storyline this season. When Sasha fills in for Joanne on the sisters’ podcast, his banter with Morgan is, of course, gold. He explains how he has used the Let Them theory to make peace with professional setbacks—then she calls B.S., and goes on to improvise her own Make Them theory, a pure expression of her aggressive approach to getting what she wants. The episode goes viral. Morgan starts to see a future for herself as a self-help author. Sasha is there to encourage her to dig deeper when her early attempts at writing fall flat. And she can be counted on to inform him that his “lucky shirt” is not exactly the chick magnet he imagines it to be. Yet they also frequently build each other up. 

Each faces more disappointment as the season goes on. Morgan blows a meeting with a publisher (Poorna Jagannathan, in her third of four high-profile TV role this year. Hey, I’m not mad about it). Sasha tries to force a connection with a woman who gets confused when he mentions the social contract. So they’re both in a tender place when Morgan impulsively invites him to accompany her to New York, where she’s been booked to talk Make Them with Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live. The season’s seventh episode is almost entirely devoted to the trip. That it is such a pleasure to, er, watch what happens between them is a testament to the power of great characters to reinvigorate old genre tropes. From the shopping montage where Sasha buys Morgan a dress, Pretty Woman style, to her earnest speech as they walk the High Line, to the false starts that end with them in bed, familiar rom-com beats feel exciting because of the affection we have for these two. Morgan’s epiphany that, “When I was younger, I always fell for people I wanted to be seen with. And now I think I just wanna be with someone who sees me,” could be a Carrie Bradshaw koan. It hits, though, because it’s so true to her character arc.

But what’s the endgame for Sasha and Morgan? Presumably in order to save some material for Season 4, Nobody Wants This pulls them apart just hours after their hookup. Sasha awakens to a note that says Morgan has hopped on an earlier flight home. There, she crashes out in bed, resigned to the impossibility of a long-term relationship with her future brother-in-law. When it dawns on Joanne that her sister is serious about Sasha, she gives Morgan her blessing. Yet by the time Morgan tracks him down and delivers another big monologue (“I don’t wanna half-ass you”), he’s decided he can’t endure her avoidance so soon after Esther left him. Then he sleeps with Esther, who’s dating a rich guy a full generation her senior (Steven Weber), laying the groundwork for an absolutely disastrous encounter between Joanne’s and Noah’s families at the mikvah.  

No end to the season could have been more apt than Joanne and Noah pledging their eternal love while, in a gorgeous beachfront rental just steps away, their parents and siblings tear each other apart. And, again, the scenes Sasha and Morgan share have become some of the most exhilarating of the show. But Nobody Wants This has always been better with isolated situations and screwball dialogue than it is with big-picture plot. With that in mind, I worry it’s written itself into another corner with this relationship. A Season 4 love triangle, with Sasha forced to choose between Esther and Morgan, could only lead back to the same old referendum on Jewish women. If the two Jewish brothers did both end up with the two gentile sisters, that would make its own, somewhat discouraging statement on the latter issue. 

Even if you can get past those implications, it’s hard to imagine Morgan and Sasha’s long-term romance arc going anywhere worthwhile, narratively speaking. We’ve already seen the culture clash, the parental pushback, the conversion drama. Are we going to do the same thing all over again, with the same abrasive mother-in-law, brief breakups, and tearful reunions—except with lower stakes because Sasha isn’t a rabbi? I’m not saying nobody wants this. I just need to be convinced. 

Nebraska native Sydney Loofe was looking for love, or at least for some fun, while scrolling through Tinder back in 2017. But the resulting date quickly went wrong, and she never made it back home. The new three-part Hulu true crime docuseries Swipe Right on the Devil tells the harrowing tale behind Loofe’s 2017 murder, how she was lured into a satanic BDSM ritual for so-called witchcraft, and how her murder led to authorities uncovering a years-long scheme run by two cult leaders. It tells the story, in part, through interviews with surviving women who escaped the cult weeks prior to her murder. 

The docuseries marks the first time the Loofe clan is sharing their side of the story, along with Nebraska investigators and an FBI agent assigned to the case. Loofe’s mother Susie Loofe wrote on Facebook that her family had been contacted by at least 100 production companies looking to make a documentary about the murder before putting their trust in Imagine Documentaries.

Swipe Right on the Devil director and executive producer Brian Biegel tells TIME that Loofe’s “mysterious disappearance” quickly became a far more “complex [story] than the headlines suggested.” Biegel, who previously worked with FBI officers while helming the ESPN 30for30 documentary The Counterfeiter, spent approximately three years immersing himself in the Loofe case. The experience forever changed his views on the occult: “As a documentary filmmaker, I'm naturally skeptical and always looking for evidence, but I also believe there are aspects of the human experience we don't fully understand,” he says. He spent years talking with the man convicted of Loofe’s murder and hearing firsthand from the women he drew into his orbit. “I wouldn't say this experience made me a believer in the supernatural, but it did make me more open-minded about what might exist beyond the physical world.” 

A Meet-cute gone awry 

Loofe, a 24-year-old hardware store clerk at Menard's in Lincoln, Neb., first connected on Tinder with a woman she believed to be named Audrey. Loofe went on two dates with “Audrey.” But she never came home from the second one, on Nov. 15, 2017. When she didn’t show up for work the next day, Loofe’s coworkers called the police to do a wellness check at her home; the officers found her car in the driveway and her purse still in her apartment. Loofe was reported missing.

It was then that one of Loofe’s friends took matters into their own hands: They created a fake Tinder profile to find Audrey, who seemed to be the last person Loofe had made contact with. Loofe’s friend matched with Audrey and gave her details to investigators, who soon discovered that the phone number belonged to a 23-year-old woman named Bailey Boswell. The search for Loofe continued. 

Her family held out hope that she would be found unharmed. But their prayers went unanswered. Loofe’s remains were found in garbage bags on Dec. 4 along the state highway in rural Clay County, Neb. She had been dismembered into 14 pieces, in what seemed to be a ritualistic manner. Her left upper arm was never recovered, and her internal organs were still missing. Authorities then set out to find out what really happened to the woman her family described as “the crystal-blue-eyed girl with a soft heart”—and why. 

A self-proclaimed vampire and his witches’ coven

Boswell’s social media apps were just the beginning of the disturbing investigation. Boswell turned out to be part of a couple with Aubrey Trail, 51, a self-declared vampire. The duo shared an apartment and both had extensive criminal histories, including theft and financial scams, across various states. Loofe was just one of the many targets that both Boswell and Trail had found on Tinder to try to lure into their makeshift “coven” under a cult-like manifesto. 

A trio of women in their early 20s,  all of whom have chosen to remain anonymous, testified in court and later in Swipe Right on the Devil that they had each met Boswell on Tinder, and were soon also introduced to Trail. They were showered with expensive clothes, spa treatments, and drugs, and given weekly allowances ranging from $150 to $200. The cost? Participating in group sex with Trail (“Daddy”) and Boswell (“Mommy”), while also helping the couple sell stolen goods. The women each testified that Trail would call himself a “vampire,” and claim that he had supernatural powers such as being able to fly and read minds. Trail also told the women that they were all now “witches” belonging to his cult, with Boswell as their leader.

Both Trail and Boswell claimed they were practicing witchcraft and black magic with required ritualistic violent acts to gain entry to their coven. Trail told the members of the “coven” that they would have to torture someone and complete a killing in order for him to gain more power as their messiah; he also wanted to film the murder and share the profits of the snuff film with each of them. The women claimed they left Trail’s cult shortly thereafter in November 2017, right before Boswell lured in Loofe. 

After authorities discovered that Trail was connected to Boswell, they searched the couple’s home and found a BDSM dog leash, duct tape, “a sauna suit with the crotch cut out, zip ties, a hatchet, a plastic drop cloth smeared with blood, and a book on anatomy.”

In the trailer for Swipe Right on the Devil, one of the women claims that Trail told her after meeting on Tinder that he and Boswell “knew witchcraft and had 12 women [and] needed a thirteenth to complete the coven.” Another survivor describes how Trail had “rules” for the coven which included being naked while around him and allowing him to watch lesbian encounters. The documentary features a segment in which one of the women tells an officer that to be in the “the inner circle,” he said she would “have had to kill somebody and take their soul.” 

“While this is fundamentally Sydney's story, it's also about the other young women manipulated by Aubrey Trail and Bailey Boswell at a vulnerable time in their lives, when they were searching for something universal: love and connection,” says Biegel. “They spoke candidly about the challenges of finding queer relationships in their conservative Midwestern communities, and how Bailey exploited that loneliness through Tinder. Once drawn into their world, they found themselves trapped in a disturbing web of manipulation, witchcraft, and demands to kill as a path to supernatural power.” 

Biegel’s fellow executive producer and Imagine Documentaries executive Christopher St. John adds that the team behind docuseries was “struck by the bravery of the three women who tell their stories at the center of this series.” St. John continues, “They lived through such an incredibly traumatic experience, but they still believe it’s valuable to share the story, whether in court or on camera.” He says the team elected to tell the story in three episodes because they had too much material to do the story justice in a feature-length film, and even still, there were elements that didn’t make it into the final cut. “Hopefully, viewers will really get an accurate sense of their thinking and where they were during this intense period of their lives.” 

A swift confession before a tumultuous trial

Trail confessed to Loofe’s killing right away, but maintained that her death was an accident. He told the police that he had engaged in consensual BDSM acts with Loofe and two other women, with the participants paying him $15,000 to film. Trail said that he had strangled Loofe with an extension cord during an erotic act and did not intend to kill her. Following her death, Trail dismembered Loofe’s body to avoid getting caught. He emphasized that Boswell was not part of the crime at all. During messages uncovered throughout the investigations, Trail is shown telling Boswell that he should be the one taking all the blame, and that she should change her narrative to come across as another “victim.”

During the three-week trial, Trail yelled out in court that Boswell was “innocent” and then slit his throat with a shank; the trial was put on hold as he was rushed to the hospital and recovered. Trail also suffered from two heart attacks and a stroke over the course of the case being presented to a jury. He changed his story during the trial, telling the jury that he killed Loofe out of fear that she would “expose my lifestyle.”

Trail was found guilty on all counts of first-degree murder, conspiracy, and improper disposal of human remains. He was sentenced to death on June 9, 2021. Trail currently is on death row and petitioned the state of Nebraska in August 2023 to set his execution date; Trail is 10th in line on death row for the state. The first and only execution via lethal injection in Nebraska took place in 2018, with the execution of convicted murderer Carey Dean Moore. Trail’s appeal in 2025 was denied. 

It was during Trail’s time on death row that he started to open up to Swipe Right on the Devil filmmaker Biegel. Over the course of a year, Biegel sought to gain Trail’s trust and participation. “Ultimately, that persistence gave us something rare in true crime: 360-degree access to the story, allowing us to explore its many layers and conflicting perspectives,” explains Biegel. 

Boswell stood trial in September 2020. There was ample physical evidence for the case against her, including DNA found on a latex glove that was in the same trash bag as Loofe’s remains. Boswell was found guilty on all counts of first-degree murder, conspiracy, and improper disposal of human remains in October 2020, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in November 2021. 

“I don't see Swipe Right on the Devil as another true-crime retelling. It's a discovery of a mystery, unfolding for the first time through the firsthand accounts of those who lived it,” says Biegel. “This isn't a whodunnit: It's a whydunnit. What really happened to Sydney Loofe, and why? The series explores the unsettling collision of ancient witchcraft beliefs and modern digital dating culture. [These are] two killers who, by their own accounts, would have continued killing had they not been caught so soon.” 

Loofe's legacy

Sydney Loofe’s family launched the Sydney Loofe Foundation in 2019. The foundation has raised more than $30,000 to be awarded in scholarships and $26,000 to be distributed to community causes. “Sydney, with a ‘y,’ never stopped to ask ‘why’ when it came to helping others,” the Loofe family wrote on the foundation website. “Although she often struggled physically, financially, and emotionally, she opened her home and heart to others. And those who knew Sydney knew of her love of family, her affinity for animals and pets (especially cats), her interest in fishing as a pastime, her fascination with beautiful crystals, and her soft heart…Sydney Loofe was a unique child of God, one who proudly had this tattooed on her arm, ‘Everything will be wonderful someday.’ Her family holds tight to the faith that indeed in heaven, that is true.” 

Correction, Oct. 22

This story originally misstated the month in which Bailey Boswell was sentenced to life in prison. It was November 2021, not July 2021.

This article discusses all six episodes of Netflix’s The New Stanford Prison Experiment.

For decades now, scholars have argued over what—if anything—we should have gleaned from the Stanford Prison Experiment. That it was unethical to place two dozen male college students in a university basement repurposed as a prison, designate a few of them guards and the rest prisoners, and encourage the former to discipline the latter, was apparent by the time its mastermind, Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, ended what was supposed to be a two-week exercise after only six days. As the extent of Zimbardo’s manipulation came to light, the 1971 study lost credibility in academic circles, even as its pop-cultural legend kept growing. Fifty-five years after it was conducted, perhaps the only definitive conclusion to draw from the Stanford Prison Experiment is that the Stanford Prison Experiment is not worth repeating.

But just try telling that to the reality-TV machine, let alone a platform currently at work on the third, all-celebrity season of a competition series that cheerfully (and, of course, non-lethally) recreates the horrors of its international hit anticapitalist battle royale thriller Squid Game. The New Stanford Prison Experiment, Netflix’s take on a project that was always more convincing as improvisational theater than as scientific research, isn’t even television’s first crack at Zimbardo’s study. The BBC got there first with The Experiment, in 2002, whose earnest attempts to correct for the original’s missteps yielded a more nuanced, if still inherently flawed, look at authority. That the Netflix version of what can now be best understood as a reboot of a famous franchise feels less like social psychology and more like a high-concept season of Big Brother is no surprise. What’s most perplexing is its choice to incorporate female participants in a limited way—and its failure to make any real sense out of what they bring to the experience.

Aware that the televised resurrection of a notoriously inhumane experiment was bound to draw scrutiny (the mere announcement of the show’s existence touched off a wave of incredulity), the producers of the six-episode series take pains to make both their safety precautions and their high-mindedness visible. Instead of a retrofitted academic building, the inmates are sequestered in a real housing pod of a Georgia correctional facility. The 30 voluntary participants are said to come from all walks of life, though what we find out about their backgrounds is generally limited to hometown, racial identity, and line of work. According to executive producer Jane Lipsitz, each “underwent psychological screenings prior to entering the experiment.” There’s a safe word any of the participants can, and some do, use to leave the roleplay early.

The appearance of legitimacy is further reinforced by a panel of three experts who provide commentary on what’s happening in the pod. Michael Cantrell, who brings 30 years of experience working in federal corrections, games out the results of the guards’ strategies. Journalist Trymaine Lee, who has covered stories ranging from Hurricane Katrina to the power of the Black electorate, was presumably tapped to bring insight into big-picture issues such as race, violence, and the justice system. But the show keeps the experts’ interjections so brief that he’s rarely afforded more than a quick sound bite. Filling a limited version of the host role is Alison Wood Brooks, a behavioral scientist on the faculty of Harvard Business School. It’s she who introduces the series with a speed-run summary of Zimbardo’s study and its “ethical breaches,” as well as the true but comically vague observation that “in today’s world, the study of power couldn’t be more relevant.” So, Brooks says, it seemed like the right time to retry the experiment in hopes of more accurately answering its original question: “Does power corrupt?”

It doesn’t take long to notice that only three of the 30 participants are women—and all of them join the five men selected as guards. It’s not hard to guess why there are no female inmates. Correctional facilities are segregated by sex. Throwing men and women together in close quarters for 14 long, monotonous days is a recipe for uncomfortable, sexually charged interactions, if not full-on harassment or assault. Of course, similar dangers exist in single-sex environments. Abuse of power seems particularly likely when male guards are put in charge of female prisoners, yet precisely this dynamic is the reality in many American prisons. I suppose untrained, inexperienced guards might be expected to pose a greater threat. But you would think that the same safeguards put in place to protect participants’ physical and mental health could be extended to enable a truly coed experiment. (The show doesn’t have much to say about the existence of transgender, nonbinary, or even queer people behind bars.) 

The architects of New Stanford might’ve avoided all of the above and still meaningfully included women by running parallel exercises in separate pods. Instead, they only examine the behavior of three women—a number so small, it precludes any claim of representativeness—in positions of authority over men. One of them, Laura Berens, is the CEO of her own business and thus presumably comfortable in a leadership role. Shavonnah Jefferson, whose background as a security guard also seems relevant here, has no trouble asserting herself. “You have to speak up,” she says. “Because if you do not, people will run you over.” Yet only Kiana Gaona, a young, devoutly Christian social media manager elected head guard by her shiftmates, gets much screen time in early episodes. Professing to believe in gender equality despite her choice to submit to her husband, she’s a bit erratic. She makes the extreme decision to give an outcast inmate a position of power, then veers dramatically in the opposite direction, punishing him and a fellow dissident with 23 hours of confinement to a cell for talking about a rebellion.

It’s these scheming inmates and the two male guards who initially claim control of their respective shifts who dominate the show for most of the season. There’s an interesting, if under-analyzed, contrast between the latter men’s leadership styles. Chris Lee, a prototypical new-school executive, wants to wield influence by inspiring his charges, while Chet Hudson, an oil rig supervisor, likens his new job to breaking horses. The resulting inconsistency fosters a bit of unrest. But it’s only after an extremely reality TV plot twist in which Lee, Hudson, and their fellow male guards switch roles with the most rebellious prisoners that a truly telling storyline emerges. Hudson, who as a guard had been the strongest proponent of a strict hierarchy, starts saying things like: “When people unite, no matter what, they’re in control of the power.” Then he makes a big deal of leaving the experiment early, claiming that he has nothing to learn from being a prisoner. For a certain kind of person, one that’s really having a moment right now in American politics, inequality only becomes a concern once they lose their place at the top.

Although the men’s role reversal remains the dominant drama, the shakeup also puts a new spotlight on the women, who are reassigned to an all-female shift. They quickly settle on Berens as head guard, citing her leadership experience. (It’s worth noting that neither of the two Black guards, Jefferson and Nicholas Washington, are shown to be considered by their peers for head guard.) “The female shift gave me an opportunity,” Berens reflects. “Obviously, the guys on my shift weren’t treating me super equal.” Unfortunately, this isn’t obvious based on the footage we’re shown, and it certainly doesn’t explain why Berens, the sole woman on her original shift, joined the majority that elected Hudson head guard. Regardless, she proves to be the most competent leader in the experiment, striking the right balance between firm rules and humane treatment. Her best moment happens when the shift made up of rebellious ex-prisoners loses control and she steps in to quiet the inmates and advise her counterpart to protect his guards.

Aside from the self-evident notion that some women make strong leaders (and some men weak ones), it’s hard to know what the takeaway from the introduction of an all-female shift is supposed to be. Maybe because they really do all respect women in positions of authority, or more likely because they don’t want millions of people watching them act sexist on TV, the inmates barely adjust their behavior when Berens’ team walks in. Another probable reason for their compliance is that they’re so intent on antagonizing the ex-inmate shift, which many feel is being rewarded for bad behavior. The women don’t come into the pod with the same baggage.

The expert commentators don’t really help make sense of the situation. When it comes to the gender issue, they could’ve supplied context about differences in how men and women typically wield authority or how men tend to perceive women in power. Maybe they did and that footage didn’t make it into the final edit. Either way, we see a lot of the experts noting that the all-female shift is fascinating without digging into specifics. The closest we get to synthesis comes from Berens. “I guess I really did have 22 men listening to me,” she marvels, attributing her success to kindness, humor, and mutual respect. “What if there are more women leaders who can lead in this type of way?” This is a subject far older than this Lean-In-era epiphany, yet New Stanford stops short at gesturing faintly in the direction of conversations that could theoretically be had.

The series’ shallow approach to gender doesn’t just weaken its depiction of the three female participants. It also neglects to acknowledge the explicitly gendered aspects of the male hierarchy, with its charismatic, physically strong leaders and smaller, less socially adept outcasts. In that sense, New Stanford replicates an ancient form of patriarchal bias that casts men as the norm and women as an atypical other. Maybe it’s silly to criticize something as inherently unserious as a reality show for failing to internalize the lessons of The Second Sex. But this particular reality show tries to justify its controversial existence by proclaiming its seriousness with regards to psychology, philosophy, and current events. So it seems fair to judge it by those lofty ambitions.

To that end, it isn’t only gender that the series glosses over. Racial disparities occasionally surface—one Black inmate justifies his obedience to authority by explaining that for his community, fighting back might result in an “accidental shooting”—yet go largely unexamined. Anyone hoping for timely debate over the purpose or efficacy of the criminal justice system is bound to be disappointed. By the time the guards are dismissed, in the finale, so that the prisoners can take responsibility for their own fates, the whole “experiment” feels like a bait-and-switch. New Stanford wants to reel in viewers with the notoriety of the original study and the promise that hot buttons will be pushed. But then, perhaps because the producers are afraid to alienate any segment of Netflix’s diverse audience, it shrinks from every opportunity to make meaning out of what happens in that housing pod. And so, as different as the two exercises are, this latest Stanford Prison Experiment becomes as pointless as the first one.

In 1972, filmmaker William Greaves arranged what we now know was one of the great parties of the 20th century: He commandeered the Harlem apartment of Duke Ellington and arranged for a special group of old friends and colleagues, many of whom had not seen one another in 50 years, to reconnect. The invitees were key figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including muralist Aaron Douglas, poet and novelist Arna Bontemps, society editor Gerri Major, jazz pianist and composer Eubie Blake, and many more. Greaves’ aim was to film the event—he appointed his son, David, as one of the cinematographers—and turn it into a documentary that would serve not just as a record of how these people lived and what they accomplished, but as a way of thinking about how we honor those who are a repository for our past. For a few hours in 1972 Harlem, it was circa 1925 again. This group of people laughing, arguing, and reminiscing about a great era of American history—and also about members of their cohort who were long gone—recaptured lightning in a bottle. And yet the resulting film, Once Upon a Time in Harlem, is one we almost didn’t see.

Greaves, who’d made a name for himself with experimental documentaries like Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), as well as establishing the pioneering public television program Black Journal, considered his Harlem Renaissance film to be one of the most important projects of his life. But although he worked on it off and on for years, he wasn’t able to complete it before his death, in 2014. At last, the film he envisioned has been brought to life by David Greaves and his daughter—William’s granddaughter—producer Liani Greaves. Once Upon a Time in Harlem is one of the great documentaries of its era, and certainly of this year. It’s history that breathes.

Ellington's elegantly appointed flat fills up quickly; for the viewer, it’s like dropping into a party right in the middle, as clusters of beautifully dressed people greet one another, embracing, laughing, talking. (Ellington himself was ill and unable to attend.) The guests make themselves at home: Photographer James Van Der Zee, who took extraordinary portraits of the major “show people” of the 1920s, as well as everyday citizens of Harlem, steps up to Ellington’s piano and runs through a few graceful, rippling phrases. We learn that he was trained as a classical musician before turning to photography, just one reminder of the ways people in the arts often need to find a means to support themselves—and sometimes those means can leave us with a lasting record of an era, as we can see from Van Der Zee’s gorgeous, expressive portraits, which flash on the screen like a blessing. Painter and activist Richard Price Nugent, when asked what it was like to be a part of the Renaissance, can’t really say. “While you’re living it, it is the now,” he reflects. Actor Leigh Whipper, the first Black man to join Actors Equity and one of the oldest in the group, and publisher and bookseller Richard B. Moore, recite long poems and passages from the era by memory. Moore calls up Claude McKay’s brilliant, lacerating poem “If We Must Die” as if he’d just learned it yesterday, but you know he’s been living with it for years.

Conversations swell through the room in waves, often prompted by Greaves himself, who was not just a filmmaker but also a poet and sculptor, a man who acted and danced. (The film has been brilliantly edited by Anne DeMare and Lynn True.) Ida Mae Cullen, the peppery widow of poet Countee Cullen, pipes up to remind the group, vigorously, that the Harlem Renaissance really lasted for just one decade, the 1920s, though its ripples began years before and resonated for decades after. For this group, politics and art are so entwined as to be indistinguishable. At one point, a vigorous yet civil cross-talking argument breaks out over the principles and philosophy of Back-to-Africa activist Marcus Garvey: there’s mutual respect in this room, but no such thing as consensus. Among other things, Once Upon a Time in Harlem might make you yearn for an era when people, including intellectuals, really knew how to dress: society editor Major, resplendent in a bold, patterned dress, sports about 10 glittery bracelets on each wrist and pulls it off with aplomb.

What’s striking about Once Upon a Time in Harlem is the seemingly casual quality most of these captured conversations. But casual isn’t the same as insignificant. Regina Andrews, a regal woman decked out in a white lace dress and vivid turquoise earrings and necklace, speaks of the job she started as a young woman, as a librarian at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. Shortly after she was hired, her superiors explained that certain poets and authors would often come to the library to work; they had special rooms reserved for them. She and her roommate became friendly with many of these luminaries, among them Cullen and Langston Hughes, and would often host little get-togethers in their apartment. The problem? They didn’t have enough dishes to go around. And so one New Year’s Day, when Andrews and her friends set out on a tour of the area’s Chinese restaurants, the men—unbeknownst to her—collected a few plates here and a few cups there. Suddenly, Andrews had enough dishes and cutlery for everybody, pieces she treasured for years.

Maybe that sounds like a minor thing, having enough dishes to entertain your friend group of poets and writers. But as Andrews tells that story, it feels anything but small. “It was just the joy of living and creating together,” she explains—as good a summation as any of what it must have been like to be alive in such a glorious time, a “now” that, thanks to Greaves and his family, becomes a part of our lives too.

When news got around that a new movie version of Sense and Sensibility was in the works, cries of dismay rang forth from Bath to Brooklyn. How could anyone dare try to top Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation, penned by—and starring, alongside Kate Winslet— Emma Thompson? But the idea that fine adaptations of great books need to be stopping points, rather than springboards, is alarming by itself. Why is a new adaptation of any Jane Austen novel such a bad thing? There are always new movie audiences, eager for their own fresh take. And just as important, why shouldn’t another generation of actors have a crack at these roles? Our ability to stream anything we want, whenever we want, hasn’t necessarily made us more adventurous; sometimes it’s just a way of clinging to familiar favorites at the expense of welcoming anything new. Austen herself, with her aversion to sentimentality, would have disapproved.

Then what would she make of Georgia Oakley’s amiable, if occasionally a little sluggish, reading of her debut novel, published anonymously in 1811? It’s hard to say for sure, but there’s nothing that’s offensive about this new Sense and Sensibility, and plenty that’s lovely. Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles play Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, sisters in a close-knit family whose temperamental differences temporarily drive them apart. As the film opens, Elinor and Marianne, along with their mother (Caitríona Balfe) and younger sister Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), are just learning that they’ll soon have to vacate the airy, comfortable house they’ve called home for years. The girls’ father has just died; his property will not go to his daughters, but to his son from a previous marriage, John (Tom Brooke), who nevertheless hopes to do right by making sure his father's second family well provided for. But his disagreeable wife Fanny (Stacy Martin), feels differently, and to maintain their pride, the Dashwood women choose to move into far more modest quarters, in an arrangement brokered by a family friend, Mrs. Jennings (a blissfully dithery Fiona Shaw).

Mrs. Jennings is also an unrepentant meddler, and she believes she can easily marry off the two eldest Dashwood girls. Ever-sensible Elinor, who never asks for much, has already met, and fallen for, Edward Ferrars (George MacKay), Fanny’s brother, as kind and modest as Fanny is arrogant. And Marianne, a dreamer who lives for music and books, has her sights set on flirty, fun Mr. Willoughby (Frank Dillane): He loves to laugh and sing and dance, and Marianne is sure he’s perfect for her, though another potential suitor, the stalwart and rather dull Colonel Brandon (Herbert Nordrum), is also circling. If you’ve never read Austen’s lively and perceptive novel—or seen either Lee’s 1995 version or the 2008 BBC miniseries adaptation—you’re left to guess which men the sisters will end up with, which is just one of the story’s delights.

But as always with Austen, there’s more to love than romance: The economics of “making a good match” are always, by necessity, lurking somewhere in these characters’ minds. In the case of the sisters Marianne and Elinor—one too dreamy, the other perhaps not dreamy enough—the differences in what they look for in a partner are almost enough to pull them apart. Oakley, who previously directed the 2022 drama Blue Jean, has a deft touch with the material and a deep respect for the English countryside setting. There are drowsy closeups of wildflowers, and shots of placidly grazing deer; a country dance feels lively and lived-in, contrasted with a later ball, set in London, where the steps are more formal and regimented—Oakley leaves no doubt as to which is more fun. Shot by Arnaud Potier, the film has a handsome, genteel look. And if at times the movie comes off as a bit decorous and stiff, the actors, particularly Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles, do their best to keep the proceedings whirring. Creed-Miles shows that there’s a slightly self-centered quality to Marianne’s romantic preoccupations—she takes pride in wearing her heart on her sleeve, though in some sense it’s also a means of getting her way. And yet as Creed-Miles plays her, it’s impossible to dislike her. When Marianne become truly hurt, we hurt for her, thanks to the bruised anguish in Creed-Miles’ eyes.

And Edgar-Jones plays Elinor, the practical sister, with just the right amount of subdued fire. Elinor is the one who always matches her expectations with reality, and as much as she loves Edward Ferrars, she doesn’t put up much of a fight when she learns she might have to give him up. Edgar-Jones gives us clues to Elinor’s submerged longing, but only in flashes. And in a pivotal scene, where Marianne accuses Elinor, angrily, of “always being right,” we can see how wounded she is, even as she recognizes that Marianne is onto something: Elinor would rather be correct than look foolish. Edgar-Jones plays Elinor as reserved without making her recessive; we can see the ways in which she wants to want more. In an age of lowered expectations—for movies, for romance, for just about everything—maybe she’s the Austen heroine we need, ready to break out of the box she’s drawn around herself. Austen knew what she was talking about, and time hasn’t eroded her wisdom.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Whalefall, now in theaters.

It's been a big few months for Austin Abrams moaning and groaning his way through some of the worst situations imaginable. First, as medical courier Bryan Hodukavich in Resident Evil, he was forced to contend with an onslaught of mutant zombie monsters. Now, as Jay Gardiner in Whalefall, he spends the majority of the film's 106-minute runtime getting repeatedly maimed inside the belly of an 80-foot-long sperm whale that weighs 60 tons.

Directed by Brian Duffield (No One Will Save You, Spontaneous) and co-written with Daniel Kraus (the author of the best-selling 2023 novel on which the movie is based), Whalefall follows Jay as he plunges into the treacherous depths off Northern California's Monastery Beach to retrieve the unrecovered remains of his late father Mitt (Josh Brolin), a legendary local diver who became severely ill from advanced, terminal Mesothelioma. The movie's opening scene shows Mitt leaving sealed letters for his wife and three children in a cooler on his boat before taking his own life by strapping diving weights to himself and jumping into the ocean. A year later, Jay still hasn't opened his letter when he is swallowed by a massive whale who's on the hunt for a giant squid in those same waters.

With just about an hour of oxygen left in his diving tank, Jay must endure a series of increasingly agonizing ordeals as he searches for a way to escape his terrifying predicament. There's a nasty encounter with the giant squid's razor-sharp beak, exposure to corrosive stomach acid, and the ever-present threat of being crushed by the whale's constricting organs or suffocating on the toxic, unbreathable methane gas inside its body. Amid the visceral horror of Jay's ingestion, we learn more about his complicated relationship with Mitt, a harsh and often emotionally abusive man, through a series of flashbacks.

Eventually, the whale breaches the surface and Jay nearly manages to break free by climbing out of its open mouth. But he ends up tumbling back inside the whale as it dives deep down into the ocean, causing Jay's eardrums to explode and him to start to hallucinate from lack of oxygen and panic. It's then that Jay, believing he is likely going to die, begins hearing his late father's voice speaking to him through the whale. As the whale is attacked by orcas, saved by its own pod, and returns to the surface, Jay is forced to process his trauma, confront the guilt and grief he feels over not visiting his dad before he died, and come to the realization that the only way he's going to survive is by applying the tough-love diving lessons Mitt drilled into him as a child to his current situation.

"The whole story is based on his relationship with his father, and not being able to take in what his father is trying to impart because of his father's personality and the way that he does it," Brolin told the Direct of Whalefall's overarching message. "And I think what the whale represents a symbol of how to get out of our own way in order to inhale those gems that you need, because I think the father really wants him to become self-sustaining, and he does it in a way that's almost paranoid. So the son can't hear it, and then when the son needs it, you see that he heard it. He just didn't hear it in the way that [his father] wanted him to, and I don't blame him, by the way."

In the end, Jay is able to escape the whale, who has already succumbed to its orca injuries, by managing to blow it up from the inside. The whole thing is overly sappy and obviously a bit preposterous, but if you're able overlook the absurdity of the premise and some particularly cheesy lines of dialogue, then you may be left feeling some type of way about the meaning of unconditional love. As the whale version of Mitt somberly reminds Jay, "The whale is forever."

Warning: This post contains spoilers for You Can See Everything

We might like to believe that documentary filmmakers are adamantly neutral parties, aiming their cameras at people who are just being themselves and, later, turning whatever the camera captures into objective truth. But because documentaries are, for now, made by humans and not robots, pure objectivity is impossible. When Albert and David Maysles captured Little Edie Bouvier Beale’s exuberant flag-twirling dance in Grey Gardens, they weren’t just casually showing us some random American eccentric in an outlandish headscarf; they were both in awe of her and, at least somewhat, laughing at her. The sequence is funny, jaw-dropping, a little sad. The camera isn’t human, but for better or worse the sensibility behind it is. It may not tell us what to think, but its job is to lead us there.

Since its surprise debut at the Telluride Film Festival earlier this fall, You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, has been widely praised as a groundbreaking documentary work, one that will change the face of nonfiction filmmaking forever. Not so fast. The first half of Fielder and Oppenheim’s film chronicles the 34 days leading up to the incarceration of Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the blood-testing technology company Theranos. Holmes was convicted of fraud in 2018 and sentenced to just over 11 years in federal prison, commencing in May 2023. To make this documentary, Fielder, Oppenheim, and their crew camped out with Holmes, her partner Billy Evans, and their two small children, observing their lives up-close—or as up-close as possible. The filmmakers had come at Evans’ urging: some time earlier, he and Holmes, who had completely withdrawn from the public eye, had approached A24 to see if the studio might be interested in making a documentary about them. In a roundabout fashion, Fielder and Oppenheim became the filmmakers charged with the task. Early in the film, we hear Evans explaining that he wanted the world to get an accurate picture of the woman he knew, a devoted partner and mother, whom he felt had been unfairly villainized. The film’s title comes from Holmes’ spoken promise to Fielder: She vowed to keep nothing hidden from the filmmakers—but did she fulfill that promise?

Throughout You Can See Everything, Fielder is often on-screen, with Oppenheim working behind the scenes. Over and over again, Holmes assures Fielder she has nothing to hide, and over and over again, his probing—if insistently performative—questions catch her in slippery half-truths. Her transparency, to paraphrase the words of Courtney Love, is so real it’s beyond fake. This is the major pattern of the film’s first half. When Fielder isn’t asking the questions, he’s lurking behind the scenes, listening in on Evans and Holmes’ conversations with a headset; when he hears something he can’t believe, his eyes widen dramatically, or his brow furrows, or his jaw hangs as slack as that of a puppet. The audience I saw the movie with giggled every time. Faux-Kabuki irony is the new earnestness. If this is the future of documentary filmmaking—or at least that of its loopier cousin, creative-nonfiction filmmaking—many of us will come to miss the late Frederick Wiseman even more than we already do.

Holmes and her let-it-all-hang-out evasiveness isn’t the problem here. If anything, her whirligig insistence on her inability to lie, or even inadvertently deceive, is at least a kind of self-invented honesty. She spins out phrases like “All I know is my truth,” before speaking tearfully about her fear of being separated from her family. As the camera rolls, Holmes works overtime to convince the filmmakers, and us, of her innocence, with Evans butting in frequently to add his 3,268 cents—2 would never be enough. (He keeps insisting that the couple have plans to start a new company, though he seems to have more invested in this scheme than his partner does.) Holmes is one of those smile-talkers—people who grin as words pour out of their mouths. One of her tricks is to never break eye contact, and we can see her working this voodoo on Fielder. Her eyes are a glassy, translucent blue. I’ve never seen eyes like this, except on creepy European-made porcelain dolls from the 19th century. Are we seriously going to trust this woman?

We’re not, and Fielder doesn’t seem to be headed in that direction either, at least at first. This is a dense picture—there’s almost too much to unpack, if you can be bothered to care about any of it. Holmes is fascinating, and weirdly compelling. But by design, Fielder is as much a player in You Can See Everything as Holmes is, and your feelings about the film overall will depend on how much of him you can take. Fielder has made a name for himself with the shows Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, in which he essentially makes himself look foolish, a little, and makes others look foolish, a lot. Oppenheim, his friend and filmmaking partner, is the director behind the recent nonfiction feature Primetime, as well as docs like the 2020 Some Kind of Heaven, which turns a sarcastic eye on the Florida retirement community known as The Villages—the ultimate in shooting-fish-in-a-barrel filmmaking. It’s hard to say who’s more responsible for You Can See Everything’s stultifying smirkiness, at least in the first half; these two are clearly of like mind.

But there’s a major shift in the film's second half, one that suddenly, and blessedly, makes it at least watchable. (If you don’t want to know anything about this twist, stop reading here.) The film's second section picks up two years after Holmes has gone off to prison, which means Fielder and Oppenheim have been deprived of their subject. What little access they might have had is severely curtailed by Evans, who now seems less like a caring husband and more like an evil puppetmaster, eager to use his wife’s words and likeness for his own gain. (His increasing aura of evil is unnerving, especially when you consider that he’s almost fully in charge of raising the couple’s two young children.) Fielder and Oppenheim are at a loss—until it occurs to them to enlist the help of Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the 2022 miniseries The Dropout, both to stand in for the disgraced entrepreneur and to weigh in on her plight.

As evidence mounts that Evans appears to be a megalomaniac, Fielder grows increasingly concerned about Holmes, and his sympathies shift before our eyes: Is she a victim, not just in the court of popular opinion, but also of the person closest to her? Seyfried seems to feel similarly, at least at first. What’s clear is that she hates to see any woman under the thumb of a potentially dangerous man (or any man, for that matter), and she thinks out loud about the possibility that Holmes, as a woman who’d been convinced that the company she’d founded could disrupt the health-care system and actually help people, may have been both manipulated and misjudged. Still, she’s clear-eyed enough to see that Fielder may be going overboard in his emotional attachment to his subject. That’s the dynamic that makes the second half of You Can See Everything click. Seyfried’s presence is the movie’s saving grace: Unlike Fielder, there’s nothing calculating about her, and the film’s second half is uncomfortably alluring.

But is that really enough? You Can See Everything is designed to make us think, hard, about the relationship between a documentarian and his subject. But anyone who's never considered that relationship before probably hasn't been watching documentaries closely enough. The intensity of the filmmaker-subject relationship—in addition to any potential untrustworthiness—is almost always implied, if not explicit. That’s true of all the films made by the great documentary filmmakers—people like Wiseman, the Maysles brothers, Agnès Varda, Werner Herzog, and many others—whether they insert themselves directly into the narrative or not. You Can See Everything has some inventive touches, and no matter what, it’s remarkable that Fielder and Oppenheim were able to keep the film a secret for the three-plus years they were working on it. But they haven’t revolutionized the documentary film; they’ve only reinforced what distinguishes a novelty from a work of genius, mere cleverness and snark from true depth of perception. Their movie feels more like a product they’ve brought to market than an example of the documentarian’s art. Are we buying or not?