If you're looking for a documentary that has an amazing sense of style or unique presentation, you may be disappointed, as from a filmmaking standpoint it's decent but maybe unremarkable. It looks like 95% of all the other documentaries produced for Netflix, and I still swear that all these Netflix documentaries have the exact same composer, or maybe the same library of stock music because they all sound exactly the same. This wouldn't be a problem if they didn't all rely on having a constant musical score so much.
HOWEVER: for what this documentary exposes, and for how it makes you understand and feel for the survivors, and for explaining how abuse can get buried within large institutions that have a power imbalance, it's fantastic. It's similar to another documentary from 2012 called The Invisible War in that regard (which I'd highly recommend to anyone who liked this one).
It takes a little while to get going, but thankfully it ends strong, and I love that it gives a sense of hope and catharsis to the survivors that you don't always get in all thematically heavy and emotionally draining documentaries like this.
(The only other thing I can comment on is that it felt like some of the scenes with the journalists discussing how to report the main case in question felt like they might have been dramatised? I can't prove it of course, but their conversations felt slightly stilted, and given that the documentary doesn't focus on the journalists, I find it hard to believe that the camera crew happened to capture this exact conversation when it spontaneously happened. It's such a small point, and it might well just be me who thought that, but I had to get it out regardless.)
HOWEVER: for what this documentary exposes, and for how it makes you understand and feel for the survivors, and for explaining how abuse can get buried within large institutions that have a power imbalance, it's fantastic. It's similar to another documentary from 2012 called The Invisible War in that regard (which I'd highly recommend to anyone who liked this one).
It takes a little while to get going, but thankfully it ends strong, and I love that it gives a sense of hope and catharsis to the survivors that you don't always get in all thematically heavy and emotionally draining documentaries like this.
(The only other thing I can comment on is that it felt like some of the scenes with the journalists discussing how to report the main case in question felt like they might have been dramatised? I can't prove it of course, but their conversations felt slightly stilted, and given that the documentary doesn't focus on the journalists, I find it hard to believe that the camera crew happened to capture this exact conversation when it spontaneously happened. It's such a small point, and it might well just be me who thought that, but I had to get it out regardless.)