Jacob Tremblay, Russell Crowe in Netflix Thriller

While Netflix has Ryan Murphy busy investigating (or flat-out making up) the motives of killers like Jeffery Dahmer, the Menendez Brothers and Lizzie Borden, the streamer has enlisted director Janus Metz to tell the story of Ted Kaczynski, the math prodigy turned reclusive murderer known as the Unabomber — also the movie’s title. But Unabomber, written by Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves, is not some sweeping birth-to-death survey of Kaczynski’s life. It instead focuses on a young Kaczynski’s time at Harvard University, where he participated in a brutal psychological study that, in the movie’s framing, may have helped form the anarchic worldview that eventually led to his infamous deeds.

Never mind that Kaczynski himself has said that the study, conducted by psychology professor and sometime government operative Henry Murray, didn’t have much effect on his life. Unabomber presupposes that it did, that Murray’s cruel (and later condemned) experiment in breaking down the philosophical principles of test subjects, stoked a rage — at academia, at technology, at universities — so fierce that Kaczynski later decided to enact his revenge. Perhaps not figuring that argument compelling enough on its own, the film tacks on a 1990s-set plot covering the days leading up to Kaczynski’s capture in Montana.

Both narratives concern people prying into Kaczynski’s psyche and finding only further questions. In the 1950s, in the hallowed, lacquered-wood halls of Harvard, we watch a perspicacious boy genius — Kacyznski was all of 16 when he started college — as his intellect, his curiosity and his naiveté are weaponized against him, hardening his most radical beliefs into ideology. In the 1990s section, we observe relative lay people as they try to divine specific clues from Kaczynski’s manifesto, markers that might give away something crucial.

These twin analyses are both facile and unenlightening. The investigation arc is so boilerplate that it has an FBI agent placing a pile of documents on her desk and saying to them, “Talk to me.” The 1950s portion of the film is at least able to conjure up some mid-century moodiness, skulking around in the nervous temper of early Cold War days, as academia colluded with government agencies to buttress the country against the perceived Soviet threat. (At its best, the film calls to mind Robert De Niro’s unfairly maligned CIA origin story The Good Shepherd, which begins its postwar tale on the leafy quads of Yale.)

And yet, the ultimate conclusions of that half of the film are just as unpersuasive as everything that happens 40 years later. That’s largely owed to starchy, frequently clichéd writing. But sadly one must put some of the blame on the actor playing Kaczynski, Jacob Tremblay, who long ago escaped the confines of Room and now, at 19, has found himself in this dark mess.

His clean-cut boyish features do actually resemble Kaczynski at that age, but Tremblay otherwise has trouble evoking the volatile storms of Kaczynski’s mind. His voice cracking and eyes wide with alarm, Tremblay effectively communicates Kaczynski’s youth, but it all plays as bratty and insouciant rather than registering as the beginnings of true menace. Tremblay was a better fit for his other recent film about extremism, 2025’s Sovereign, in which his guilelessness served a more poignant purpose.

As Murray, Russell Crowe has dusted off his A Beautiful Mind professorial duds and phones in a performance of avuncular appeal masking sinister motives. We believe that Murray cares, in some way, for Kazcynski — or, at least, that he’s impressed by the student’s prowess — but not enough to stop his predatory work.

The portraiture is not very detailed beyond that. Part of the problem may be that, for the bulk of the experimentation, Murray is out of the room. Kaczynski is instead sparring with a fellow student, a haughty older boy played by the reliable Gus Halper, who did towering work as another collegiate monster in the under-seen 2016 frat-hazing thriller Goat. Had Tremblay and Crowe been given more opportunity to go toe to toe, something in the picture might have caught flame.

Instead, Unabomber trudges through its motions, toggling between grim school daze and a tediously generic FBI manhunt. In the latter part, Shailene Woodley does her best to give some texture to her rogue agent character, Joanne, but she has precious little to work with.

Perhaps cognizant of that, the filmmakers give Joanne a brief, humanizing button at the end of the film, a moment of solitude in which she has a cathartic cry as she processes all that she’s just experienced. The scene might register as thoughtful were it not such a blatant rip-off of the closing seconds of Zero Dark Thirty, in which a dogged investigator who’s finally caught her prey sheds tears of relief and exhaustion and something more ineffable. It doesn’t pack the same punch the second time around, and at the end of something so bland.

Watching Unabomber, one longs for a smarter, more sophisticated, more probing version of this same double-act. A better film about what might have radicalized Ted Kaczynski that also delineates how he was eventually captured could be startling and revealing, complicating the public idea of Kaczynski as mere renegade madman. But this film serves up only the most basic, obvious version of that — try as it might, at times, to immerse us in murky psychological depths. In the end, it has all the markings of a final paper written by a student who got all the dates right, but failed to find the real meaning behind any of the history.