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- American Nightmare Directors – Bernadette Higgins, Felicity Morris Rating – 4/5
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American Nightmare: With Denise Huskins, Aaron Quinn, Henry Lee, David Sesma. After a harrowing home invasion and kidnapping in 2015, a couple is accused of staging the ordeal when the woman reappears in this true-crime docuseries.
- (18K)
- 2024-01-17
- Documentary, Crime, Mystery
- 45
American Nightmare. Watch American Nightmare with a subscription on Netflix. After a harrowing home invasion and kidnapping in 2015, a couple is accused of staging the ordeal when the woman...
- Bernadette Higgins, Felicity Morris
- TV-MA
- 1
Awards | FAQ | User Ratings | External Reviews | Metacritic Reviews. American Nightmare (TV Mini Series 2024) on IMDb: Movies, TV, Celebs, and more...
- A true-crime series that finds small ways to transcend a familiar setup
- American Nightmare Gallery
- What's the best Netflix true-crime documentary?
- Verdict
By Steve Greene
Updated: Jan 22, 2024 11:42 pm
Posted: Jan 22, 2024 10:31 pm
The central events depicted in American Nightmare took place in the spring of 2015. As the first season of Serial and HBO’s The Jinx urged a renewed interest in true crime (and Netflix’s “Making a Murderer” waited in the wings), an odd news story emerged from northern California. Initial news reports described an incident in the city of Vallejo, where a woman was kidnapped from her home, taken from the bed where she and her boyfriend were sleeping. An American public with a freshly developed taste for unsolved mysteries lapped up the coverage, which drew parallels between the hunt for Denise Huskins and one of the decade’s most popular fictional cases of a missing woman.
Knowing that any retelling of this story will be fraught with questions of a murky truth, series directors Bernadette Higgins and Felicity Morris first put their focus on Aaron Quinn, who went to local law enforcement after – in his words – being woken up by a team of kidnappers and then drugged as Denise was abducted from the home they shared. Aaron is framed in the way true-crime interview narrators so often are: sterile room, alternating camera angles, pregnant pauses while relaying details both horrific and bizarre (the alleged perpetrators disguised themselves in wetsuits, by Aaron’s telling). American Nightmare justifies its three-episode structure (it could have been roughly a 2-hour movie otherwise) by introducing new narrators as the story moves along the timeline.
Sprinkled in throughout are the dramatic reenactments that are standard for headline-grabbing stories like this one. Here, though, Higgins and Morris tone down the junky basic-cable aesthetics of their predecessors: Heavily-filtered, hazy flashbacks are replaced by something more visceral. A narrow, mostly point-of-view window into these recreations satisfyingly locks each chapter into a more personal perspective. An extreme close-up on an eyeball, repeated for effect through one extended stretch, is particularly chilling.
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Other -- let us know in the comments.
The latest hit Netflix docuseries finds chilling and effective ways to go beyond the standard true-crime expectations. Yet, even as it ends up at a broader message beyond the unusual circumstances of a single kidnapping case, it’s hard to shake the idea that the overall structure of the show and its “twisty thriller” framing are working against wha...
- Steve Greene
2024 | Maturity Rating: 16+ | 1 Season | Documentary. After a harrowing home invasion and kidnapping in 2015, a couple is accused of staging the ordeal when the woman reappears in this true-crime docuseries. Watch all you want. JOIN NOW. Videos. American Nightmare. Season 1 Trailer: American Nightmare. Season 1 Teaser: American Nightmare. Episodes.
- Felicity Morris, Bernadette Higgins
- January 17, 2024
- 2 min
Jan 17, 2024 · The three-part documentary from Felicity Morris and Bernadette Higgins centers on the 2015 kidnapping and sexual assault of Denise Huskins. The police accuse Denise and her boyfriend Aaron Quinn of a hoax when she reappears until a home invasion robbery turns up evidence of the kidnapping.
Jan 17, 2024 · American Nightmare offers more than a twist-filled tale of kidnappers in wet suits, peeping toms, and mistaken identities...[it's] the best bait-and-switch documentary since The Queen of...
