Netflix began streaming its Ted Kaczynski drama Unabomber on September 25, 2026, and IndieWire’s critic, Alison Foreman, had a pointed question for it: was the man crazy, and does the film have any right to say so?
Her review, published the night before, gave the film a C+. The draw, she wrote, is Jacob Tremblay, now 19 and far removed from his breakout role in “Room,” playing the young Kaczynski. Russell Crowe plays Dr. Henry Murray, the Harvard professor running a controversial study when Kaczynski was an undergraduate. Shailene Woodley anchors the later FBI storyline, and Annabelle Wallis plays the researcher Christiana Morgan. Janus Metz Pedersen directed; Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves wrote the script.
The disputed diagnosis
The review’s central complaint is about invention. In the film, Murray’s experiment ends with Kaczynski being given a schizophrenia diagnosis. IndieWire says there is no verified record of that happening, and that the movie turns an argued-over question into a tidy answer. Kaczynski spoke to several clinicians after his 1996 arrest and rejected their conclusions, the review notes. He kept insisting he was sane even when mental health evidence might have helped him avoid the death penalty, and other experts disputed the diagnosis too, suggesting a personality disorder fit his symptoms better.
The critic compared it unfavourably with A Beautiful Mind, which was also heavily fictionalised but rested on a thoroughly documented diagnosis and involved no crimes.
What the record shows
The real campaign killed three people and injured nearly two dozen more over decades. The last package killed California forestry official Gilbert Murray, no relation to the psychologist, in April 1995. Kaczynski then threatened to kill again unless a major newspaper printed his roughly 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” The Washington Post ran it that September in an eight-page insert, and the New York Times published portions. His sister-in-law recognized his ideas in print, his brother compared the text with Ted’s earlier writing, and the two reluctantly went to investigators. The Harvard study played no part in that.
The study itself was real. Participants wrote statements of their beliefs and faced a filmed confrontation in which those values were attacked. Kaczynski was reportedly chosen partly for his score on a questionnaire measuring alienation.
Where the film works
Foreman credits Tremblay with delivering monologue after monologue about abstract social ideas with the conviction of a prodigy sure he is right, and calls Crowe a legible antagonist. But she argues the film leans so hard on the harm done to Kaczynski that it leaves little room for what he chose to do to others. Over the closing credits, real audio and images of Kaczynski play, with the man himself saying from prison that he would prefer to be depicted truthfully but is willing to be a symbol for his cause.
Kaczynski died by suicide in 2023. His ideas found a fresh audience online after the 2017 Discovery series Manhunt: Unabomber, a show that circulated on Netflix.
