‘It’s crazy how having a phone could become the worst thing that happened to me...’
I’ve pretty much stopped watching true crime documentaries all together as they have now coalesced into a homogamous blob in which all of them seem to be telling the same stories the same way without any of the originality that made them so compelling in the first place. While Unknown Number: The High School Catfish definitely falls into this bracket, it also doesn’t outstay its welcome and is just unique enough to justify its own existence. I watched it in the throes of norovirus and I can confirm that it did at least distract me from my own intense misery for 94 minutes…
Everything seems to be going pretty swell for high school sweethearts Lauryn Licari and her boyfriend Owen McKenny until they both start being bombarded with threatening and offensive text messages. Unknown Number, from director Skye Borgman, dissects who was sending the messages and how they were caught.
While this unflinching Netflix doc is often entertaining, it is also surprisingly predictable, and when the big reveal finally lands, Borgman never really does enough to explain the motivation behind the text messages. That being said, this feels like a very modern mystery, and the film provides an insight into the terrifying implications of a bunch of emotionally unstable teenagers walking around with smart phones in their pockets 24/7. It is a strange world that we live in indeed.
Unknown Number is fine as a time filler (particularly if you’re trying to block out stomach cramps, apparently), but it’s also very similar to many other true crime documentaries out there. It’s also worryingly similar to Netflix’s own parody of the genre, American Vandal – probably not a good sign.
