The Investigation of Lucy Letby is a 2026 Netflix documentary directed by Dominic Sivyer, produced by Blast Films, running 92 minutes and released on 4 February 2026. It revisits the case of Lucy Letby, the neonatal nurse convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder others at the Countess of Chester Hospital, who is currently serving fifteen whole life orders. It promises unseen footage and previously unheard insider accounts. What it delivers is one of the more baffling and disrespectful pieces of documentary filmmaking I have encountered, and I want to start with the reason why.

Two contributors to this film asked to remain anonymous, which is an entirely ordinary and reasonable request. The production's solution was to generate artificial faces and superimpose them over the real people, accompanied by an on-screen caption reading "digitally anonymised." One of the two is a mother who lost her baby.

It does not work, and I am not remotely alone in saying so. The generated faces produce expressions that do not correspond to what is being said. The eyes are vacant. A woman describes the single worst experience of her life, and the thing on screen has the affect of a lightly rendered background character in a science fiction film. Reviewers have variously described it as AI slop, uncanny, dehumanising and disgraceful, and Common Sense Media went as far as calling the whole exercise a form of hoodwinking. The most damning observation I read was that the AI figures make the film bland and unemotional, which is an extraordinary thing to achieve given the subject matter.

The frustrating part is how solvable this was. You can film someone in silhouette. You can hire an actor to voice a transcript. You can use a black screen with altered audio, which documentaries have relied on for half a century and which nobody has ever complained about. Instead somebody signed off on this, presumably because it was cheaper, and in doing so reduced two people's genuine pain to something artificial.

Then there is the structure, which is its own problem. Roughly the first seventy minutes assemble the case against Letby comprehensively and persuasively. Then, in the closing stretch, the film pivots, introducing the counter-argument that the increase in deaths might be attributable to failures at the hospital rather than to any individual, including the post-trial suggestion that the drop in deaths after her removal reflects the unit losing its status as a destination for the most critical cases. Having raised all of that, the film then simply stops. It reaches no conclusion, offers no synthesis, and rolls credits. A substantial portion of the closing text consists of various parties declining to comment because of ongoing investigations.