Russell Crowe's New Netflix Thriller Just Divided Critics, and the Reviews Prove It

Netflix's new true crime drama Unabomber landed on the platform September 25, and it took critics almost no time to split into two very different camps. Some are praising Russell Crowe's performance as one of the best things he's done in years. Others think the entire film builds its story on invented psychology that never actually happened.

What Unabomber Is Actually About

Rather than retelling the FBI manhunt in a straight line, Unabomber runs two timelines side by side. One follows a composite FBI agent named Joanne Miller, played by Shailene Woodley, as she works to identify the bomber terrorizing the country through the 1990s. The other jumps back to the 1950s, where a teenage Ted Kaczynski, played by Jacob Tremblay, takes part in a series of psychological experiments run by Harvard professor Henry Murray, played by Russell Crowe. The film's central argument is that those experiments directly shaped the man Kaczynski became, a theory that's popular in pop psychology circles but far from settled among historians and researchers who've actually studied the case.

That structural choice is exactly where critics have started fighting. The Harvard timeline is where most reviewers say the film actually earns its runtime, largely because Crowe plays Murray with a controlled, quietly unsettling authority that several reviews single out as some of his best work in years. Tremblay, still better known for younger roles, holds his own opposite Crowe as a teenager who is clearly being pulled apart in ways he doesn't fully understand yet.

Why the FBI Storyline Is Getting Torched

The manhunt half of the film is where the reviews turn sharply negative. Multiple critics describe Woodley's Agent Miller as stiff and underwritten, with one review calling the dialogue in her scenes stereotypically wooden. Instead of building tension the way the best true crime thrillers do, several reviewers say the manhunt sections feel more like watching someone slog through procedural paperwork than an actual investigation, which is a rough thing to say about the half of the movie built to carry its suspense.

The bigger criticism, though, is about honesty. Several reviews point out that Unabomber leans heavily on speculative and invented material to connect Kaczynski's Harvard experience directly to his later crimes, presenting a tidy cause-and-effect narrative that the historical record doesn't actually support. For a film marketing itself as based on a true story, that's the kind of criticism that tends to stick, especially once entertainment journalists start comparing specific scenes against the public record.

How It Fits Into Netflix's Fall Lineup

Unabomber arrived in the same week as a wave of other Netflix originals, from the Law and Order revival's twenty-fifth season to a new season of The Great British Baking Show with Nigella Lawson joining the judging panel. It's a crowded release calendar, and a divisive true crime drama competing against comfort-watch programming and long-running procedurals means Unabomber's staying power on the platform's top ten will likely depend more on word of mouth than on critical consensus.

That crowded fall slate follows a pattern Netflix has leaned on for a while now: keep something for almost every kind of viewer in rotation at once. Fans still waiting on the final stretch of Wednesday's extended run now have a very different kind of show to fill the gap, even if the tone couldn't be further apart. And for a platform that just spent the week dealing with headlines about celebrity news cycles moving at Taylor Swift speed, a serious true crime drama gives Netflix something to point to beyond pop culture noise, whether or not critics end up agreeing on whether it actually works. If you're planning a Unabomber viewing night, this week's early Prime Day deals include a handful of budget-friendly TVs worth a look before committing to a big streaming session.

For now, Unabomber sits in that awkward but common streaming spot: divisive enough to generate conversation, uneven enough that it's unlikely to sweep awards season, and starring two actors doing genuinely different levels of work in the same movie. Whether that's enough to make it worth your time probably depends on which half of the film you think a true crime drama should be built around.