Casting JonBenet review: Filmmaker Kitty Green brings an engrossing documentary with an interesting approach to screens, a film that endeavors to get to the truth behind the horric murder of JonBenet Ramsey back in December of 1996.
Casting JonBenet review by Paul Heath at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival.
Casting JonBenet review
Casting JonBenet will be the next big Netflix original documentary to hit the streamer, but one can appreciate seeing this on the big screen ahead of its home release at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival, where it makes its big debut.
The film is a kind of docu-drama telling the true story of the brief disappearance and murder of six-year-old Colorado native JonBenet Ramsey in 1996. Kitty Green’s film assembles a cast of actors supposedly auditioning for various roles in a dramatization of JonBenet’s story, a crime which remains unsolved to this very day. The filmmaker bases her search for actors to play the key roles for the film in the actual town where the crime was committed, and the result is an interesting insight into the murder of the young girl from the point of view of the many varied people who turn up for those auditions.
As one may expect, the result of this exercise is very interesting, and having not been too familiar with this horrific true story, despite the wide reporting of it in the U.S. at the time, Green’s film slowly drip-feeds details of it through its many talking heads throughout – which is rather interesting as some of these people knew the Ramsey family and other people involved. The interviewee’s responses and opinions, all of which are answered direct to camera, along with given pre-prepared dialogue, are often baffling, varied and sometimes very funny, which given the film’s extremely dark source matter, is also very welcomed.
Casting JonBenet review
Sprinkled in are cinematic, really well produced segments reconstructing the events that come after the crime was committed using some of the ‘actors’ that we’ve been watching in the audition sequences. Again, this is an unusual film-making approach, but one that works rather wonderfully.
Despite its very dark subject matter and the many talking points that the film raises, Casting JonBenet is a very easy film to watch, but one that does eventually intensify as it reaches its surprising, very well thought out closing sequence, one that uses all of the aforementioned audition-ees to great effect. This is truly one of the most surprising, most well made and original documentaries of the year so far.
Casting JonBenet review by Paul Heath, February 2017.
Casting JonBenet will be released on Netflix worldwide from April 28th 2017.
