Unabomber is a 2026 Netflix true crime drama directed by Janus Metz, written by Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves, starring Jacob Tremblay as the young Ted Kaczynski, Russell Crowe as Harvard professor Henry Murray, Shailene Woodley as FBI agent Joanne Miller and Annabelle Wallis as Christiana Morgan. It was released on 25 September 2026 and holds a twenty-six percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from forty-seven critics, with a Metascore of forty-six.

This is my first exposure to anything concerning the Unabomber. No documentaries, no series, no dramatisations, nothing. I arrived with a completely blank slate, which is either the ideal or the worst possible way to approach a film like this, and I am still not entirely sure which.

The thing I keep returning to is Henry Murray, because I spent a good portion of this film assuming he was a dramatic invention, and he is not. Murray was a genuine Harvard professor and the director of its psychiatric clinic, and he co-developed the Thematic Apperception Test, which remains a widely known psychological assessment. Ted Kaczynski entered Harvard at sixteen years old and participated in a series of psychological experiments conducted by Murray, which were deliberately designed to be hostile, humiliating and personally invasive. That is not an embellishment. That happened to a sixteen-year-old boy.

The film's entire thesis rests on that. It argues that this is where everything began, that a young man was broken in a room by somebody who should have known better, and that the bombings which followed can be traced back to that desk.

It is a genuinely interesting approach, and it is also the element that critics objected to most strongly. Reviewers described the connection as tenuous and noted that the film pushes the idea far harder in its closing passages than the evidence can support. One critic framed the uncomfortable question directly, asking whether the audience is being invited to feel empathy for Kaczynski and to stop holding him responsible for what he did.

I think that is exactly the right question to ask of this film. What struck me while watching is that there was plainly a person in significant distress here over a long period, and that virtually nobody around him recognised it or acted on it. That is a real failure of its time and it is worth naming. But it is not an explanation and it is certainly not a defence, and I would push back on any reading that treats it as one. Both things hold simultaneously. He was clearly unwell, and he was entirely responsible for what he chose to do. It is also worth noting that the question of his mental health is considerably more contested than this film suggests. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia by a court-appointed psychiatrist, rejected that diagnosis outright, refused an insanity plea, and experts have disputed it in the decades since.