Reluctantly? Yes. I am wary of Netflix documentaries.
The ones with colons in the title, I pretty much universally avoid. You know what I'm talking about. Just taking two at random that are being spruiked when I go on Netflix right now, how about Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare and Into the Deep: The Submarine Murder Case.
See, rather than Netflix creating a platform for documentaries that would otherwise have no outlet to our eyeballs, I feel like it is creating documentaries that would not otherwise exist. While this is also, on the surface, a good thing, it's not a good thing when they are Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare and Into the Deep: The Submarine Murder Case.
But Con Mum had no colon, so I went for it.
Mid.
I'm not going to say Nick Green's film is bad, but it's very mid, in a perfectly Netflix way.
What do I mean by that?
A lot of talking heads, shot straight on. A lot of archival footage, much of it repeated, sometimes more than once. A subject that is interesting enough to warrant a movie, only just, but might have just as easily never been filmed.
Past examples of this? Sure, I've got 'em. And it doesn't mean I disliked these films. In fact, I was reasonably appreciative each of them:
Longest Third Date
The Tinder Swindler
Our Father
The Social Dilemma
Not a colon in there, but maybe there should be.
Speaking of colons, I am avoiding anything in this relatively recent Netflix Untold series, where everything is Untold:, and then something that, well, hasn't been told, and that I don't want to have told.
I get it. I am not your typical Netflix viewer. I don't gravitate toward true crime. Things that exist for purely salacious reasons don't particularly fascinate me (though don't get me wrong, I can get into the salacious when it's done correctly). I don't want what I'm watching to go in one of my ears and out the other.
But Con Mum did.
Look it's an interesting enough story. A woman gets in touch with her son after 45 years and then starts to con him out of his money, claiming she is the illegitimate daughter of the Sultan of Brunei. She builds a convincing enough facade, as all good scammers are capable of doing, that he doesn't seem like an idiot for falling for a story that seems very much adjacent to the letters you get from a Nigerian price offering you a big financial inheritance if you just send some small amount of money for processing fees.
But I don't know, aren't these true crime stories a dime a dozen? And hasn't Netflix, with its relentless content fire hose approach, made us intimately aware of just how cheap and disposable and interchangeable they are?
The very next night, though, this perspective slightly shifted.
Perhaps wanting to get my lagging documentary content up overall, whether it helped me with my 2025 rankings or not, I put on another documentary that was playing on Netflix, from 2024, not perhaps realizing, when I first heard about it, that Netflix was also a distributor of this documentary, not just a service that happened to be streaming it.
Why didn't I make this connection, you ask, especially when I was so attuned to the mid quality of the Netflix documentary? And not just because there was no colon?
Maybe because I heard The Remarkable Life of Ibelin discussed briefly on Filmspotting, one of the oldest film podcasts and one I have been listening to and trusting since 2011. Their discussion of a film gives it a certain imprimatur, or at least distinctiveness beyond the sea of non-fiction content Netflix make available to us all. I think it's fair to say they have never mentioned a Netflix documentary that had a colon in it.
What's more, I remembered that Ibelin was directed by Benjamin Ree, a filmmaker whose previous effort, 2020's The Painter and the Thief, was one of Filmspotting co-host Adam Kempenaar's favorite films of that year. Which seemed to remove it from the realm of the director-for-hire projects I am considering Netflix guilty of today.
Well, it was a lot more than mid.
I'm not sure the subject matter of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin exceeds our most cynical expectations of a documentary, as it is quite sentimental in remembering a young man who succumbed to complications from muscular dystrophy. But the execution is what makes a film clearly surpass its own potential limitations, and Ree's film has that big time.
For one, it put me in mind of one of my favorite movies of last year, which wasn't available to most people until this year, though I got out ahead of them by seeing it at MIFF. That's Grand Theft Hamlet, the documentary that takes place entirely inside Grand Theft Auto as the avatars stage Hamlet during COVID. That movie mixes its comedy with profundity, while this one is much more skewed toward the profundity side. But like that movie, a lot of this takes place inside a video game, or at least, the animators' rendition of that video game, as Mats Steen, the young man at the center of the movie, escaped the limitations of his body by existing in a World of Warcraft game community that came to consist of very real friendships, even though they had not met IRL. There's something about watching video game characters engage in activities involving real pathos that really gets me.
Then there's the little details about how to handle the rest of it. Instead of every talking head interview being shot at brightly lit medium depth -- the kind of setup that engendered the dismissive term "talking head" in the first place -- I noted that some of these interviews were ata side angle, and halfway across the room. If that seems like a superficial change for misguided reasons of artistry, or just intentionally breaking the mold of the typical talking head interview, that is not how I perceived it. Or even if that was Ree's thinking, then I congratulate him for it rather than faulting him for the choice.
Even lathering it on a little thick about its central character and his impact on others in the world despite the lack of likelihood that he would ever be in a position to do that, it's a really good film.
So I guess I can't really prejudge the problematic subgenre of the Netflix documentary, even as I might like to -- which is probably a good thing, considering that Netflix is our only consistent source of access to documentaries out there.
Who knows, maybe I'll even watch one with a colon in the title.
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