New year, new true-crime documentary from Netflix. Age cannot wither the genre made famous by the streamer all the way back in 2015 with Making a Murderer, which explored the wrongful conviction of Steven Avery for sexual assault and attempted murder who spent 18 years in prison for that and who was later tried and convicted of another murder. That documentary was a decade in the making. Things move more quickly now, and the preferred content is more palatable to a mass audience – tales of victims’ survival and the very rightful conviction of perpetrators meet the voyeuristic appetite and proxy lust for vengeance without requiring too much painful thinking abut the inadequacies of a country’s legal system, say, or the corruption of its law enforcement.
Still, the new approach has brought some astonishing untold stories of forgotten victims into the light and – usefully or not – given us a better measure of the depraved depths to which men can go. (And it is almost always men, who either have an innate problem or need to bring a suit against an incredibly biased set of film-makers and commissioners tout damn suite.)
It is too early to say for sure but it’s possible the latest offering marks another shift towards greater ease of delivery (for producers and consumers of the goods, not the survivors and loved ones who share their experiences therein). Kidnapped retells one of the most high-profile stories of abduction there has been in recent times – that of Elizabeth Smart, who in 2002 at the age of 14 was taken at knifepoint from her bedroom in the middle of the night while her terrified little sister watched, and held for nine months by a man who raped her virtually every day and threatened to kill her and her family if she tried to escape.
The 90-minute film covers its ground swiftly and efficiently. There is footage of the Smart family’s close-knit Mormon community turning out in droves to put up posters and help in the extensive police search for the missing child, and of her father, Ed, breaking down in tears every time he tried to speak about her at press conferences. The police and Elizabeth’s sister Mary Katherine talk about the difficulty of having the fragments of information about the abductor that the terrified nine-year-old could provide as their only real leads.
We hear from Ed now as he remembers the falling away of support as the police – as police have to do – investigated the family as possible suspects, and the additional doubts fuelled by media speculation and about the family’s frustration when the police fail, as they see it, to follow the lead offered when Mary Katherine remembers where she first heard the kidnapper’s voice. Eventually the Smarts go against police advice and publicise the name and sketch portrait of Brian David Mitchell, a homeless man the family had had contact with, themselves. He was eventually identified as a self-styled preacher going under the name of Immanuel David Isaiah and he was indeed Elizabeth’s abductor. They had been seen around town relatively locally, masked and clad in long white robes. An officer had even questioned them but backed off when Mitchell said it was against their beliefs for a woman to speak to him.
And we hear from Elizabeth herself, now 38 and an activist for survivors’ rights and for protection of vulnerable people against predators. She speaks notably frankly about her experience of rape and the shame it engendered – never shying away from either word – because of her religious upbringing. She remembers how the first time he raped her she thought she could avoid it by lying on her stomach. When she woke after passing out from the pain, she found herself shackled. It was the beginning of a nine-month ordeal.
It is clear that the disavowal of shame is her main message and, presumably, a large part of her reasoning for taking part in the documentary. It is striking and undeniably uplifting how firmly she explains herself, outlines her extraordinary suffering and the psychological effects of intense fear at the hands of a violent man (and his accomplice Wanda Barzee), and puts the responsibility back on Mitchell for what he did and how entitled he felt to do it.
It took nearly 10 years for the case to go to trial, thanks to Mitchell’s various attempts to have himself declared mentally unfit to stand. “I felt the process was rigged against me,” says Elizabeth. But she stayed the course and in 2011 Mitchell was found guilty of kidnapping and transporting a minor across state lines for the purposes of sexual activity and sentenced to life without parole.
It’s probably best not to think too hard about true-crime documentaries fulfilling a therapy role for the untold thousands of survivors of terrible things. Nor the fact that they will never run out of content.
• Kidnapped is on Netflix now
