Jason Bailey
A couple of weeks back, Slate culture writer Sam Adams posted this conundrum on Blusky:
an Oscar-winning filmmaker, a living master of the medium, has a new movie on Netflix in 15 days. There’s nothing on their press site, and I haven’t received a single email. I would wager few people know it even exists. Meanwhile, I have screeners for TV shows that drop in late April. Explain.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker he was referencing is the documentary innovator Errol Morris, who won his Oscar for the probing policy examination The Fog of War, made Roger Ebert’s all-time ten best list with Gates of Heaven, and basically invented the modern true-crime documentary (and got an innocent man off Death Row) with The Thin Blue Line. His new movie on Netflix is CHAOS: The Manson Murders, an adaptation/expansion/meditation on Tom O’Neill’s riveting and baffling 2019 book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.
The day after Adams’s post, Netflix finally put something up on their website about the movie, and released a brief but tantalizing trailer. And a great deal of what’s happening here is an ongoing concern for those of us paid to pay attention to Netflix — the feeling that they spend vast amounts of money to produce or acquire work by important filmmakers, only to bury them with a minimal amount of publicity and an outsized amount of trust in their algorithm. And on top of that, it’s a Netflix true crime documentary, and on top of that, it’s a Netflix true crime documentary about a serial killer. They don’t really have to go looking for an audience, or advertise that one of them happens to have a classy pedigree (just ask Joe Berlinger, the acclaimed co-director of Brother’s Keeper and Paradise Lost who has, per his IMDb bio, “16 Netflix productions under his belt”).
But the bare-minimum release of CHAOS also speaks to something depressing in the current climate of non-fiction cinema. Once upon a time, and not that long ago, a new Errol Morris movie was an event. A Brief History of Time, Fast Cheap & Out of Control, Mr. Death, Standard Operating Procedure, The Unknown Known; these movies were big deals, released by major distributors like Sony Pictures Classics, Lionsgate, and The Weinstein Company.
And then, about a decade ago, something subtly shifted. In 2017, he made Wormwood, which he deemed an “everything bagel” movie (it mixed all forms and techniques of his filmmaking, from traditional documentary to scripted narrative), for Netflix, where it made no more of a splash than most of their “content.” His 2018 feature American Dharma, an extended conversation with (a sly subversion of) Steve Bannon, had difficulty finding distribution, and was shrugged off by critics for lacking the piercing payoffs of The Fog of War. (This was not Morris’s fault; Fog subject Robert S. McNamara was capable of some degree of self-reflection and self-criticism, and Bannon simply is not.)
His 2020 film My Psychedelic Love Story and its 2023 follow-up The Pigeon Tunnel were made for Showtime and Apple TV+, respectively, and they basically disappeared there; last year’s Separated, an urgent and prescient warning of the barbaric immigration policies possible under a second Trump administration, was buried by MSNBC until after the election, when it aired to little fanfare. (There is also last year’s Tune Out the Noise, which I have not seen, and which appears to be essentially a 90-minute commercial financed by its subject, the investment firm Dimensional Fund Advisors.)
An argument can be made that the reason these films have not penetrated even arthouse cinema circles is that they’re not as good as his earlier work. That take is not altogether without merit — I certainly wouldn’t claim any of the late Morris output rivals Thin Blue Line or Gates of Heaven in terms of first-watch high quality. But there are things worth seeing in all of them: continuations of career-long thematic preoccupations, bursts of unexpected humor (often in Morris’s off-camera reactions to his subjects’ wilder statements), and of course, a peerless sense of style, using his distinctive visual sensibility, cockeyed archival footage choices, and hypnotic sound design to draw the viewer into even the most mundane of events.
American Dharma becomes, in some ways, a film about itself, in which we sense Morris’s frustration to find some semblance of reflection or even humanity within Bannon’s hollow crust of a human being. My Psychedelic Love Story is a fine entry in the third, less-discussed corridor of Morris’s filmography; like Tabloid and Vernon, Florida, it’s a portrait of weirdos, of the strange company we sometimes find ourselves in during our journey through humanity, and how we react to them. The Pigeon Tunnel is something like an extended episode of his marvelous docu-series First Person, and as with that show, is at its best when it departs from the standard biopic beats and ponders the essential question of inscrutability. And Wormwood is a low-key crowning achievement, both for its combination of styles and subtle shift in focus, from a true crime investigation to a portrait of decades-long obsession.
That is, in some ways, also the ultimate subject of his new film CHAOS: The Manson Murders. The ostensible subject is Charles Manson: when and how he committed his crimes, and the lingering questions that surround the official narrative of both his motive and means. Rehashing the details of one of the most well-documented crimes of the 20th century seems, at first blush, beneath a filmmaker like Errol Morris, but that’s not what he’s doing (or not all that he’s doing). He seems more interested in Tom O’Neill, who started investigating the Manson murders for a 1999 thirtieth-anniversary magazine piece and went into a rabbit hole for thirty more years. He blew his deadline, the publication itself went belly-up, he ran out of money, but he just kept digging, because there were all of these things in the story we were told — in prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s bestseller Helter Skelter, in the TV movie adaptation of that book, and in countless true crime books and documentaries much like this one — that simply did not add up.
“What does it all mean?” O’Neill says. “I’m very honest about not knowing.” And so, in that way, CHAOS becomes something like a documentary counterpart to David Fincher’s Zodiac, an exploration of obsession and enigmas and conspiracies. Morris spends a fair amount of the running time on the particulars of the murders — perhaps too much, and there’s a question of necessity there (how much of this is familiar to freaks like me, and how much does the casual Netflix viewer need to be read in on). The film doesn’t really come alive until Morris goes into the rabbit hole with O’Neill, digging into the American intelligence apparatus’s experiments with mind control and memory replacement, drawing sensible comparisons to the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS programs, and asking reasonable questions about how this dangerous man was allowed to walk free and orchestrate his crimes, even while ostensibly under the watchful eye of Californai’s parole system. “I would never go that far to say that it was orchestrated,” O’Neill insists. He simply doesn’t understand how “Manson had leeway to do whatever he wanted for two years,” and he’s not the only one.
Morris uses the snazzy inventory of his well-stocked toolbox to tell the story briskly: archival footage, crime scene photos (with the bodies whited-out, an especially creepy touch retained from the Helter Skelter book), maps, graphics, newspaper clippings and documents, audio of O’Neill’s interviews and Morris’s own, and, of course, some dramatizations. He has quite a history with dramatizations; when he used them for the first time, in The Thin Blue Line, documentary purists were up in arms, insisting that such flourishes were antithetical to the “truth” of non-fiction cinema. His use of them in that film, and of an original score by Philip Glass (another no-no at the time) were the late-20th century equivalent of Dylan going electric, and the presence of both in The Thin Blue Line was the most common explanation for its otherwise inexplicable omission from that year’s nominees for Best Documentary Film at the Oscars.
Of course, those touches have become cornerstones of contemporary documentary filmmaking in general, and true crime documentary in particular. (Such conventions are pointedly pinpointed and skewered in the Sundance documentary Zodiac Killer Project, and one of that film’s unstated but undeniable conclusions is how much Morris has influenced an entire subgenre.)
When I asked him about making another film/series in the Wormwood style back in 2017, he confessed, “The only problem is that they’re very costly… I do wanna do it again. I just need to find those companies willing to pay for it. I’ve developed an expensive hobby! But I kind of love doing it.” And so, Errol Morris making a barely-promoted Netflix true crime documentary is not a reflection on the quality of his current work; it’s a reflection on the bleak landscape of non-fiction cinema in 2025, the tattered remnants of a burst bubble in which this is the only kind of movie that even a savvy, commercially-oriented filmmaker like Morris can get paid to make. It would, indeed, be easy to relegate him to has-been status, just another cog in the Netflix true-crime doc machine. And that would be a real shame for an artist of his considerable stature and influence.
“CHAOS: The Manson Murders” is streaming on Netflix tomorrow.
