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- American Nightmare expertly lays out all the evidence to tell a full story. The editing and archival footage is expertly edited for emotional effect. The series' focus on the victims and the justice system is fulfilling. Cons It's a great true crime series but lacks the ambition of a masterpiece.
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Watch American Nightmare — Season 1 with a subscription on Netflix. Equal parts infuriating and suspenseful, American Nightmare is an instructive chronicle of institutional bias making a...
- A true-crime series that finds small ways to transcend a familiar setup
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- 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.
Tiger King
Making a Murderer
Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes
The Keepers
Amanda Knox
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
Pros. American Nightmare expertly lays out all the evidence to tell a full story. The editing and archival footage is expertly edited for emotional effect. The series' focus on the victims and...
Jan 18, 2024 · Episode 3 – | Review Score – 5/5. Netflix is the self-proclaimed king of true crime and has consistently churned out top-quality real-life crime dramas since the huge success of Making a Murderer in 2015.
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 23, 2024 · American Nightmare is compellingly made, with an odd and disturbing saga at its center. But what would feel in 2015 like a shock to the system is now an above-average addition to a subgenre...
