The Based on a True Crime Boom and Its Ethics

Somewhere around the launch of Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer series in 2022, the true-crime dramatisation stopped being a genre and became a utility, like true-crime podcasts and true-crime cold-case Reddit threads before it. The Dahmer show topped charts worldwide, and while it did, the sister of one of Dahmer’s victims — Rita Isbell, who had delivered a famous victim-impact statement at the 1992 trial — went on the record to say no one had asked her, and that watching her own courtroom breakdown recreated for streaming felt like being robbed. That is the true-crime boom in one image: enormous profit on one side of the screen, a family that was never consulted on the other. The films and series that survive scrutiny are the ones that took that imbalance seriously before a frame was shot. Most do not.

I love a lot of crime cinema. I have written admiringly about killers and cons and the men who chase them. But the moment a film attaches itself to a real death, it inherits obligations that pure fiction never carries, and the interesting critical work is figuring out what those obligations are and which films honour them. This is a craft question as much as a moral one, because the ethical choices and the aesthetic choices turn out to be the same choices.

The point-of-view decision is the ethical decision

Every true-crime film makes one structural choice before all others: whose eyes are we behind? Get that wrong and no amount of taste redeems it; get it right and the film earns the right to exist. The cheapest, most common move is to ride shotgun with the killer, because the killer has the agency, the momentum, the “interesting” psychology. It is also the move that quietly converts a murderer into a protagonist, and a protagonist is someone an audience is built to root for. That is the rot at the centre of the glossier Ted Bundy pictures, which cast a magnetic lead and then act surprised that viewers found him magnetic.

The counter-model is to refuse the killer the throne. David Fincher’s Zodiac is the master text here, and its discipline is total: the film spends its whole runtime with the investigators and obsessives orbiting the case and never once hands the audience the certainty of the killer’s identity, because the real case never delivered it either. Zodiac is a procedural about the cost of obsession, which is a story about the living — the reporters and cops the case hollowed out — rather than a highlight reel of the dead. Fincher understood that the ethical camera position and the interesting one were identical. The murders are brief, clinical, horrible, and then gone; what lingers is the wreckage they leave in the people who cannot stop looking.

Bong Joon-ho found the same truth from the opposite hemisphere. Memories of Murder turns Korea’s Hwaseong killings into a national wound precisely by keeping the killer offscreen and unknowable, so the film becomes about the failure of the men tasked with justice and the era that produced them. When the real perpetrator was finally identified by DNA in 2019, decades after the crimes, the film’s refusal to invent a culprit looked less like restraint and more like wisdom. It had declined to give a real, unsolved atrocity a fictional face.

Aftermath is more honest than reenactment

There is a second fork, and it separates the responsible film from the exploitative one nearly as reliably as point of view does. Does the film reconstruct the violence in loving detail, or does it work in the aftermath? Reenactment is where true crime turns into a peep show. The camera lingers on the killing because the killing is the “content”, and the victim dies a second time as spectacle for an audience that came to be thrilled. Aftermath cinema — the investigation, the grief, the institutional failure — treats the death as a fact with consequences rather than a scene to be staged.

The best true-crime-adjacent films often decline to show the crime at all, or show it once and refuse to repeat it. This is the old lesson of In Cold Blood, Richard Brooks’s 1967 film of Capote’s book, which withholds the Clutter family murders until late and then delivers them as horror rather than entertainment. It is also, in a jagged, disreputable register, the achievement of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, John McNaughton’s 1986 film loosely drawn from the Henry Lee Lucas confessions — a film so committed to making murder feel banal and sickening that it becomes an argument against the very genre it belongs to. You leave Henry unable to imagine wanting to watch it again, which is the point.

When the aesthetics do the arguing

The most instructive failures are the films that are made well and still land wrong, because they prove the ethics live in craft rather than in intentions. Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is superbly directed and spent years accused of endorsing torture, because its clean procedural style presented brutal interrogation as a step in a functional process. The film’s coolness — the thing that makes it gripping — is exactly what made viewers read it as approval. Style is an argument whether the filmmaker means it to be or not.

Compare the way Nightcrawler turns the camera on the true-crime appetite itself. Dan Gilroy’s film is fiction, but it is the sharpest film about the real economy the boom runs on: the freelance ghoul filming other people’s worst nights for a broadcast market that pays for fear. It indicts the consumer, which is the one thing the average true-crime product will never do, because the consumer is the customer. When I want to feel clean about my own crime-film habit, Nightcrawler is the cold shower.

The consent problem nobody wants to solve

Here is the uncomfortable machinery under the whole boom. In most jurisdictions you cannot defame the dead, and public events are fair game for dramatists, which means a studio can build an eight-part series on a real murder without asking a single surviving relative for permission. The law permits it. The question is whether a filmmaker should hide behind what the law permits, and the Dahmer backlash was really an argument about that gap — a chorus of victims’ families pointing out that “legal” and “decent” had come apart.

The films that clear the bar tend to do one of two things. Either they fictionalise enough to release the real people from the story — changing names, compositing figures, admitting on the tin that this is invention riffing on fact — or they do the slow, expensive work of bringing the survivors in, giving them a say and sometimes a cut. Craig Zobel’s Compliance, drawn from a real and almost unbelievable series of hoax strip-search phone calls, took ferocious criticism at Sundance in 2012, and the defence that held up was that Zobel was interrogating obedience and complicity rather than gawping at the victim. The film is hard to watch because it wants you to squirm at your own deference to a voice claiming authority. That discomfort is aimed at the audience, which is the tell of a film doing ethical work rather than dodging it.

The cottage industry mostly does neither. It changes nothing, asks no one, and banks the attention. Speed is the enemy of care here: the streaming model rewards getting a dramatisation out while the case is still trending, which is exactly when the wounds are freshest and the survivors least able to consent to anything.

A working ethics for the viewer

I do not think the answer is to boycott the whole form. Some of the best cinema ever made touches real crime, and the impulse to understand why people kill is ancient and legitimate. The answer is a set of questions to run against any true-crime film before you praise it, and they are the same questions its makers should have asked first.

Whose point of view carries the film, and does it convert the killer into a hero by accident? Does the film work in the crime or in its aftermath, and if it stages the violence, does it stage it once with horror or repeatedly with relish? Is there any evidence the survivors were consulted, or is their grief being harvested without a knock at the door? And does the film’s own style quietly endorse the thing it depicts? A film that comes through those questions clean has earned its subject. A film that fails them is a peep show with production values, however handsome the lighting.

The corpse in a true-crime film was a person, and that person’s people are often still alive to watch themselves be turned into content. The films I keep — Zodiac, Memories of Murder, In Cold Blood — remember that at every level, from the camera position down to the edit. Start there, then read the whole boom against them, and most of it falls away.