Girl in the Picture (2022)

This may be the saddest and most wrenching true-crime story I have ever seen, vying with talhotblond and Dear Zachary in a competition where I don’t want to know the winner. One thing about true-crime stories is they are about things that more or less actually happened, squarely in the “you can’t make this up” category of things. Or you could make them up, but no one would believe you. This Netflix documentary delivers shocking twists and turns on the regular, launching the saga with the death of a 20-year-old woman on a lonesome highway in Arizona in 1990. The woman’s husband and kid hightail out of the region and so it all begins to unfold across years and decades. I will say I was annoyed with the style of the storytelling in the first third or so of this feature-length picture. It struck me as the “peekaboo” style of narrative, intimating it has things to tell us but not telling us, because too often it has little really to tell us. But no, this is actually an insanely complicated case and there were times I got a little lost in it, so in the end I appreciated getting the information one morsel at a time, carefully designed to clarify more than the obfuscations and delays of the peekaboo style. Girl in the Picture adds up to a story of great enormity and tremendous sadness. I don’t want to give much more than that away about it. Things are never quite what you think they are. It’s about the girl in the picture in the poster and her amazing indomitable spirit which is nonetheless trampled. It’s an elusive mystery and a terrible story of human depravity. It’s an indictment of the system and a cautionary tale about human predators—they are capable of more than you can even suspect, at least if you’re as naïve as I may be. It breaks your heart just to learn what they do. It’s not giving away too much to say it is heartening in the end but any feel-good was accompanied for me by a surprising amount of hard crying. I mean, maybe I was in the mood or something. Or maybe documentaries like this just do things to me and you.