Russell Crowe plays a Harvard professor who draws a teenage Ted Kaczynski into a psychological experiment. Jacob Tremblay plays the gifted, isolated student who takes part. Their encounters give Netflix's "Unabomber" its strongest reason to watch: the film asks what happens when a powerful academic treats a vulnerable young person's distress as material for research.
The drama moves between Kaczynski's years at Harvard and the FBI's hunt for the bomber decades later. Director Janus Metz told Netflix that Tremblay was his choice to play the young Kaczynski after seeing him in "Sovereign." Tremblay said he drew on his experience of being a child actor surrounded by adults to portray a teenager struggling to fit in at university.
Crowe's Henry Murray brings a different kind of tension. Metz described the professor as charismatic yet capable of appearing "almost demonic." In the film, Murray draws Kaczynski into a confrontational study, while Annabelle Wallis plays his research partner, Christiana Morgan. Those scenes invite viewers to question the ethics of the experiment and the authority Murray holds over his students.
They also invite caution. Netflix's cast profile says Murray changes Kaczynski's life, but the film's account of how an experience at Harvard relates to his later violence is an interpretation. Variety critic Guy Lodge argues that the drama gives the experiment more explanatory weight than it can support. Viewers may find the Harvard scenes unsettling without accepting them as an answer to why Kaczynski became a bomber.
Shailene Woodley anchors the other half of the story as Joanne Miller, an FBI agent examining Kaczynski's manifesto. Miller is fictional, a detail viewers should keep in mind as the film dramatizes the investigation. Woodley said her character must try to understand Kaczynski's thinking to find him, even as she rejects where that thinking led.
That structure gives "Unabomber" two mysteries to pursue. The agents want to know who committed the bombings; the Harvard scenes ask how a promising student became capable of them. The first question has a known answer. The second is harder, and no single experiment can settle it.
"Unabomber" is worth watching for the unease Crowe and Tremblay bring to that unresolved question. Its Harvard scenes offer a disturbing encounter between a professor and a student. Whether the film earns the larger conclusion it draws from that encounter is something viewers can judge for themselves.
