Ppsychopathic ass. For several years, Netflix has been breaking audience records thanks to serial killers, confirming this ancestral fascination of the public for the types who like to cut and scatter their neighbor like a puzzle. Thus John Wayne Gacy – nicknamed “the killer clown” –, a respected businessman who buried teenagers in his basement, was entitled to his documentary (Self-portrait of a killerby Joe Berlinger) this year, just like Ted Bundy in 2019, whose murderous madness was also traced in a film with Zac Efron (Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, also by Joe Berlinger).
Last serial killer to embody this law of the series: Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal of Milwaukee. A blonde with glasses above all suspicion (except for his neighbor) who killed, dismembered (and sometimes cooked) seventeen young homosexuals – most of them African-Americans – between 1978 and 1991. The series Dahmer (by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan) is, to date, the most watched in Netflix history.
In this plethora of slightly anxiety-provoking offers when you live on the ground floor, the narration, whether it is fiction or documentaries, endeavors to retrace the course of these psychopaths, in series or not, after the fact. , often described by those around them as affable, polite and charming – the prototype of the guy who is happy to invite you to barbeuc and who always thinks of taking out the trash. A documentary filmmaker filmed the factory of the monster in real time.
Chronicle of a Foretold Massacre
In Deep Sea Crime (on Netflix since September 30), Australian director Emma Sullivan follows for a year, in Copenhagen, the crazy adventure of a famous Danish inventor, Peter Madsen, and his young team of volunteer engineers devoted to their mentor. The project: launch a remote-controlled rocket by a private submarine, the UC3 Nautilus. Madsen then declares, prophetically, facing the camera: “We will be remembered as heroes or criminals, surely criminals. » The documentary changes when Kim Wall, a Swedish journalist, disappears at sea with the inventor, on August 10, 2017. The submarine is no longer found. Peter is finally fished out, alone.
The end is known. Madsen, who has long denied the facts despite overwhelming evidence, was sentenced to life imprisonment on April 25, 2018 for having kidnapped, raped, tortured and then dismembered the young woman. A premeditated calvary of long date. Excerpts from Emma Sullivan’s documentary were used by the prosecution during the trial, and for good reason. Throughout the film, before the facts occur, dissonances appear between the flamboyant character, loved and admired by all, and the deep nature of the entrepreneur, as dark and unfathomable as the abyss. Like the chronicle of an announced massacre. Peter talks about himself in the third person, denigrates his teams behind their backs, tells his trainee about the videos of women being decapitated or burned with acid that he collects on the Internet.
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