Larrimah is an outpost in the Australian outback with a population of 11. I think there’s a version of this twisted tale that has a little more affection for the people of Larrimah (and runs much shorter than this 120 minutes), but there’s enough to like here in a well-done true crime doc. There’s nothing that feels exploitative about the true crime doc “Last Stop Larrimah,” which premiered at SXSW before an HBO drop later this year, although the tone does sometimes verge, like the opening act of “Citizen Sleuth,” on something that's making fun of small town life. And I think all of this could do some good in the end if future podcasters watch “Citizen Sleuth” and ask themselves the questions at the core of this movie before turning tragedy into profit. It all probably hurts right now, but she is an engaging personality with a passion for what she does. There are also a LOT of bad ones out there that blur the line. And I do think there are ways to do it well-I would recommend all three podcasts in the intro above for examples. He basically solves the case, and that’s not a good thing for a podcaster-which is kind of problematic, right? We have an entire industry built on NOT solving cases because, as Nestor says at one point, “It’s hard to prove a murder when there wasn’t one.” As it develops, “Citizen Sleuth” reveals itself to be more than just a study of how wannabe profilers now become podcasters when Nestor interviews the legendary investigator Paul Holes about the evidence around the case, and, well, he destroys every potential criminal theory. Rushed police work and suspicious behavior of other people that night led to the creation of “Mile Marker 181”.įrom the beginning, the investigation around the accident by Nestor and her team feels like it’s stretching-they even claim that the main suspect used to be a bed wetter, for example. Briefly, it looked more like she had been hit by a car than thrown from one in an accident, and she had been in a fight earlier that evening. Davis was found dead on the side of Interstate 77, and her injuries were odd enough to suggest a deeper investigation. And so she starts a podcast that investigated the death of a woman named Jaleayah Davis in 2011. A massive fan of “ The Silence of the Lambs,” Nestor wants to be Clarice Starling for the podcast era. She is reportedly unhappy about her portrayal in “Citizen Sleuth,” but I found her engaging, charismatic, and ultimately sympathetic. That’s where the smart and engaging Nestor lives. It’s a film that doesn’t just fit right next to one of their most successful sections, it interrogates it.Īt first, I was a little thrown by Kasick’s approach, and I do think the first act of “Citizen Sleuth” feels like it’s looking down a bit on the people in this Appalachian corner of the world. I’d be stunned if Netflix or Hulu weren’t negotiating for this one right now. How does a podcaster stay objective when their bottom line is based on mystery more than truth? If a case ends, the advertising dollars do too. As Emily Nestor, the host of “Mile Marker 181” (which I had listened to in part, by the way), discovers that the case that she has built her career around may be a house of cards, “Citizen Sleuth” goes from an interesting personality piece to something richer that speaks to the entire world of true crime. By focusing on one podcaster’s journey through her career and a singular case, Kasick finds the gray area that the best true crime journalists have to navigate. Most of the criticism of the craze out there feels judgmental and superficial, throwing out comments on how exploitative the genre can be or dismissing viewer/listener interest in it as facile. And so I was instantly drawn to the premise of Chris Kasick’s fascinating “Citizen Sleuth,” one of the best dissections of our current obsession with true crime that I’ve ever seen.
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