Most movies about serial killers, whether real or fictional, aren’t actually about the killers themselves. They’re about the chase, the manhunt, and the people crazy/dogged enough to delve into the madness until the end. Ted K is not that movie, preferring instead to provide a character study of The Unabomber, a man who, despite penning a 25,000 word manifesto in 1995 that landed him in prison for life, we still know very little about. Filmmaker Tony Stone’s film puts its authentic qualities right out on front street: the film was shot in Montana on the very land Ted Kaczynski once lived. The words eloquently relayed by star Sharlto Copley pulled directly from Kaczynski’s own writings.
Ted K uses Montana’s lush, natural beauty to paint a surreal, if plodding picture of a man who saw technology as the bane of human existence, calling it the “worst thing that ever happened to the world.” But how does this belief play out in the film? Intriguingly, in measured doses, as Copley’s Kaczynski takes in the rapid encroachment of progress as the deathknell of the natural world. In the opening moments, a hidden Kaczynski watches as an affluent family snowmobiles through the wild. Later, Kaczynski enters a computer store and the disdain he has for it and every customer is palpable. Every now and then, we’ll see Kaczynski fire off a couple of shots at passing helicopters, or mail off a package with explosive contents we know means someone is about to die.
The film handles Kaczynski’s murderous acts with a passive eye. It’s easier to depict what the Unabomber believes and what he does than to figure out what’s really going on in his mind. Copley’s performance is tightly wound, quietly menacing, with the most disturbing moments coming when Kaczynski is forced to interact with the society he has denied. We never know what he might do when something doesn’t go just right. Lose a few coins at the pay phone? Well, is someone going to have to die because of it? That unpredictability, the feeling of being constantly on edge, is what drives Ted K when it starts veering off course. Stone relies on fantasy, introducing a fairly-like woman (Amber Rose Benson) only he can see, as part of Kaczynski’s further break from reality and the loneliness that has settled into his soul. Backed by Copley’s tremendously unsettling performance and an unnerving score by Blanck Mass, Ted K doesn’t need fantastical flourishes when the reality, that such an enigma walked among us and caused so much damage, is terrifying enough.
Ted K is available in theaters and digital now.
