Can I Tell You a Secret?
I watched the new two-part documentary film “Can I Tell You a Secret?” on Netflix. The story centers around young women, mainly three (Lia, Abby and Zoe) in the United Kingdom who are randomly (I think?) picked and cyberstalked on social media by an apparent real life social outcast who got away with it for several years. Part one pretty much hones on the stories and angst of the victims while the back half is mostly focused on the perpetrator, why he did it, the committed police officer who stayed on his trail and the trial/verdict. Here’s my brutally honest takes:
PROS: I thought the documentary took a reasonably good stab illustrating precisely how Lia, Abby and Zoe were stalked, and was fantastic at capturing their raw emotion throughout. Their emotion was apparent and probably the highlight for me because I mean, you’re not human if you don’t feel like what happened to them is fucked up. It was also nice to see the actual video moment (literally just a moment) that the perpetrator got himself caught after accidently going live on Instagram for a split second. Also, kudos to the police officer (Kevin Anderson) for digging in and working to uncover the case-- it was nice to see that as opposed to the standard “law enforcement is fumbling shit all over the place” montages we usually get in crime docs (even if often true). Lastly, a pretty well debated topic about how much leniency the perp should get based on him having autism and how much him having autism had, if any bearing on why he turned out to be such a piece of shit.
CONS: The voiceovers from the perp as well as the vast majority of re-enactments were absolutely God awful. Those scenes made me wonder if a professional director or some college freshmen put “Can I Tell You a Secret?” together. The suspect, supposed to be taking serious as a haunting voice literally sounded like a fuckin’ cartoonish character in the Wayans brothers “Scary Movies” series. Also, over the course of a two-part series with each airing over 50 minutes, I expected some twists and turns---not really an outlandish expectation considering this feels somewhat billed as a whodunnit stalker mystery. I thought I’d be hearing about and from multiple suspects but nope, there’s really one suspect and it’s about proving that he’s guilty. This was (supposed to be) suspenseful—where’s the suspense? I also hated how there’s no explained correlation or in this case, none among the perpetrator and his three victims from episode one. Did he pick their names out of a hat or something? I’ll keep going--- cyberstalking’s so prevalent now and I didn’t think they did nearly a thorough enough job of demonstrating how so. One last thing---the perpetrator’s sentence was the longest sentence ever handed down in the UK for online stalking, but I didn’t learn that from watching this and instead did by simply reading about it online.
VERDICT/GRADE: It’s a real dilemma because on one hand two episodes wasn’t enough to really deep dive further into more nuances of multiple woman being stalked and the short/long term effects it had on them---we basically got the cliff notes version, often moving so fast it felt hard to get fully invested. They could’ve used more time to at least attempt to elaborate on why each of the women were targeted by someone who never met them. On the other hand, two episodes felt like two too many for me and that’s because other than feeling empathy for the innocent young women, I really didn’t give a shit about anything else. For me, this story compared to more compellingly psychotic documentary stories was a bland, vanilla waste of time. Perhaps most importantly, I left barely more knowledgeable about why the villain did exactly what he did to these women specifically. Translation, this shit kind of sucked and ain’t no way I’m recommending you spend roughly two hours finding out for yourself. Watch “American Nightmare” on Netflix instead, it’s way better. Grade: D
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