By Julia York
If you’re like me, watching a documentary can be a hit or miss experience.
At my core, I want to be that person who watches documentaries more than they watch, say, Family Guy. I would like to be educated, worldly, and in possession of intellectual dinner conversation. But sometimes the path to being educated, worldly, and intellectual is well, boring.
Hence my general problem with selecting documentaries.
However, I am also a sucker for dramatic, tragic stories that may or may not involve murder. Murder will always be fascinating.
So if you’re someone who usually passes over the “Documentaries” category of Netflix and thinks, Learning about stuff is all well and good, but I don’t feel like watching some snooze-fest about how grass grows, I have selected seven documentaries that will wreck you to your core and leave no room for boredom or your emotional well-being.
(Click on the documentary name for the trailer!)
INTO THE ABYSS
I started watching this documentary at the gym and haven’t finished it yet, but the general premise is enough to both intrigue me and destroy me: a man convicted of a triple homicide (which he committed as a teen) is interviewed eight days before his scheduled execution.
You can watch Into the Abyss on Netflix.
THE JINX
OMG, what are you even doing with your life if you haven’t watched The Jinx yet?
Beheadings, a man hiding in Texas pretending to be a woman, and three unsolved murders are what you have to look forward to in this documentary miniseries.
What makes this film incredible is that the subject of the film, Robert Durst, voluntarily agrees to be interviewed over several years about three murders he is tied to (including the disappearance and death of his first wife). As this documentary was on air and before they filmed the last episode, new information came out about one of the murders that WILL BLOW YOUR BRAIN BOX.
You can watch The Jinx on HBO.
DEAR ZACHARY: A LETTER TO A SON ABOUT HIS FATHER
If you enjoy being disturbed/shocked/spooked/outraged/growing soggy in a puddle of terrified and anguish-filled tears, Dear Zachary is the documentary for you.
If you think The Jinx’s twist ending was enough to crush your belief that you are good at predicting film conclusions, prepare to have Dear Zachary squash any ego you had left.
You can watch Dear Zachary on Netflix.
THE HUNTING GROUND
The Hunting Ground is a difficult but important documentary to watch because it highlights not only the INSANE prevalence of rape and sexual assault on college campuses, but also the lengths top universities will go to to maintain their image in light of such cases.
What left me wrecked after watching this film was the lingering question of, “Why is campus sexual assault the norm and not the exception?”
You can watch The Hunting Ground on Netflix.
GRIZZLY MAN
I have seen Grizzly Man THREE TIMES because it is so profoundly haunting.
This documentary is a portrait of an awkward, passionate outsider who spent years filming himself living summers alone in the wilderness of Alaska. Well, alone except for the grizzly bears he loved, the same bears that would eventually kill him.
Grizzly Man asks you to look and to keep looking even when you feel as though you have stumbled on something too intimate.
You can watch Grizzly Man on Amazon.
Film Roast 