UNABOMBER (2026) Review: Janus Metz's Grim Chamber Piece

The screenplay bifurcates its timeline with surgical precision. In the 1950s and early 1960s, we watch teenage Ted (Jacob Tremblay) become the subject of psychologically brutal experiments orchestrated by Professor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe) at Harvard - sessions designed to dismantle a subject's defenses and observe what remains. Murray's methods, dramatized here with a clinical chill, plant seeds of paranoia and rage that will not surface for decades.

Then the film leaps forward. FBI agent Joanne Miller (Shailene Woodley) picks up the thread of a domestic terror campaign that has confounded the Bureau for years. As bombings accumulate and the public grows restless, Miller's hunt for the so-called Unabomber becomes a mirror: the deeper she digs into Kaczynski's isolation, the more the system that produced him looks complicit. The film refuses to let anyone off the hook.

Metz, working from a lean script, directs with the same austere tension he brought to his documentary work. He favors cramped framing and muted palettes - Harvard's corridors feel like trap doors, Montana's cabin like a coffin. There is no glamour here. The film's central insight is that Kaczynski was not born in a vacuum but engineered, piece by piece, by men who mistook cruelty for science.

Crowe is the film's engine. His Murray is not a cartoon villain but a serene narcissist, convinced of his own intellectual righteousness, and Crowe plays him with a velvet menace that lingers. Woodley's Miller is the audience surrogate, and she invests the role with a weary determination that keeps the procedural sections from feeling like filler. Alexander Ludwig, Marc Menchaca, and Steven Ogg populate the margins with credible, lived-in texture.

Tremblay is the revelation. His Ted is not yet the figure from the headlines; he is a brilliant, lonely boy slowly being hollowed out. The performance is mostly silent, all twitches and averted eyes, and it is devastating precisely because it never begs for sympathy.

Where the film falters is its ending. After spending so much time on causation, it abruptly shifts into chase-thriller mode, and the tone wobbles. The climax wants to be a reckoning but lands closer to a shrug, rushing through the moral questions it spent two acts carefully raising. It is a frustrating close to an otherwise gripping film - as if the filmmakers lost their nerve at the finish line.

Still, the journey is worth it. UNABOMBER is less interested in the bombings than in the broken machinery behind them, and it succeeds on that front.

Pros

• Jacob Tremblay delivers a haunting, largely wordless performance as young Ted
• Russell Crowe channels quiet, unnerving menace as Professor Henry Murray
• Metz's austere visual style keeps the film tense and claustrophobic throughout
• The screenplay refuses easy answers, implicating both Murray and the broader institution

Cons

• The final act pivots into conventional thriller territory and loses thematic focus
• Shailene Woodley's Miller is underwritten compared to her male counterparts
• Some historical nuance is flattened for dramatic effect
• At 101 minutes, certain supporting threads feel rushed or abandoned

UNABOMBER is a handsomely mounted, deeply unsettling film that earns its TMDb rating of 7.05 with strong performances and a refusal to moralize. It is not the definitive account of Ted Kaczynski, but it may be the most intimate - a portrait of a man unmade before he ever became infamous. If the ending underwhelms, the journey there is consistently compelling, and Tremblay alone justifies the ticket price. Recommended for patient viewers who prefer their true crime with a psychological scalpel rather than a sledgehammer.