The fact that they made this after a real life event (or 2) is what torpedoed the movie into nothing. And the very simple reason for that is, there is no story; there is no real life anything to work with.

And this is what this movie is. Absolute conjecture of absolutely nothing. It's just bad.. it doesn't depict anything and credits roll and all of a sudden it scrolls a literal news summary? Why?

If you want to make a movie talking about such an event, fabricate it. Make up imaginary story instead of trying to pretend it is a documentary of nothing. Again, there is no real life story to go with this, look it up. It did happen but there is nothing else to it. They have 0 source material to work with!

It is literally like they did that as an afterthought to just cover up their abysmal concept and script. There is no other way to explain it.

Just skip this honestly. The whole movie is the worst attempt of grade school metaphor ive seen in decades.

Go watch bastard out of carolina for something similar but done right.

I have to be honest, I only gave this review based on the fact that I did not expect the content of this film. I wish there had been a "trigger warning", while the director did warn us about the content being on children point of view of abuse, abuse is a pretty vague word.

I finished the film, wanting to get out of the theatre more than once. I, victim of child abuse, did not want to be reminded about something I spent years trying to forget. I often wonder if my review would be fair parting from this point of view, but I believe I deserved some kind of warning. I also can not justify the director's choice of keeping the graphic footage instead of just implying the ways the children were abused. Dont get me wrong I am a huge fan of Mind hunter and its second season is quite graphic, but the scenes of real children filming this actually haunted me.

Long story short: the movie is beautiful, the story is not.