Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart Review – Her Candor About Her Ordeal is Truly Inspiring | TV and radio

nNew Year, a new true crime documentary from Netflix. Age can’t wither The genre rose to fame through streaming in 2015 with Making a Murderer, which explored the wrongful conviction of Steven Avery for sexual assault and attempted murder for which he spent 18 years in prison and for which he was later tried and convicted of another murder. This documentary has been in the making for a decade. Things move more quickly now, and favorite content is more palatable to a mass audience – tales of victims’ survival and the rightful condemnation of perpetrators satisfy voyeuristic appetites and vicarious revenge without requiring much agonizing reflection about the shortcomings of a country’s legal system, for example, or the corruption of law enforcement.

Yet the new approach has brought to light some astonishing untold stories of forgotten victims and, whether useful or not, has given us a better measure of the depraved depths to which men can reach. (And it’s often men who have an innate problem or need to file a lawsuit against an incredibly biased group of filmmakers and commissioners.)

It is too early to say for sure, but it is possible that the latest offer represents another shift towards greater ease of delivery (for producers and consumers of goods, not for survivors and loved ones who share their experiences on the matter). “Kidnapping” retells one of the most notable kidnapping stories of recent times — that of Elizabeth Smart, who in 2002 at the age of 14 was abducted at knifepoint from her bedroom in the middle of the night while her terrified little sister watched, and held captive for nine months by a man who raped her almost every day and threatened to kill her and her family if she tried to escape.

The 90-minute film covers ground quickly and efficiently. There are shots of the Smart family’s close-knit Mormon community turning out in droves to put up posters and help in the intense police search for the missing child, and of her father, Ed, breaking down in tears every time he tries to talk about her at press conferences. Police and Elizabeth’s sister Mary Katherine talk about the difficulty of obtaining bits of information about the kidnapper that the terrified nine-year-old can offer as their only real leads.

We hear from Ed now as he recalls the decline in support he received when the police – as the police must do – investigated the family as potential suspects, and the additional suspicions fueled by media speculation and about the family’s frustration when the police, as they saw it, failed to follow the evidence provided when Mary Catherine remembers the place where she first heard the kidnapper’s voice. Eventually, the Smarts went against police advice and released the name and sketch of Brian David Mitchell, a homeless man with whom the family had been in contact themselves. He was eventually identified as a self-proclaimed preacher under the name Emmanuel David Isaiah who was actually Elizabeth’s kidnapper. They have been seen around town relatively locally, masked and wearing long white robes. One officer even questioned them but backed down when Mitchell said it was against their beliefs for a woman to talk to him.

And we hear from Elizabeth herself, now 38 and a campaigner for survivors’ rights and the protection of vulnerable people from predators. She speaks with remarkable candor about her experiences with rape and the shame she generated — and is never ashamed to use either word — because of her religious upbringing. She remembers how the first time he raped her, she thought she could avoid it by lying on her stomach. When she woke up after losing consciousness from the pain, she found herself shackled. It was the beginning of a nine-month ordeal.

It is clear that disavowing shame is her main message, and perhaps a large part of the reasons for her participation in the documentary. It is both striking and undeniably uplifting how assertively she explains herself, lays out her extraordinary suffering and the psychological effects of extreme fear at the hands of a violent man (and his partner, Wanda Barzee), and places the responsibility back on Mitchell for what he did and how he felt entitled to do it.

It took nearly 10 years for the case to go to court, thanks to Mitchell’s various attempts to have him declared mentally incompetent to stand. “I felt like the process was being rigged against me,” Elizabeth says. But she stayed the course and in 2011 Mitchell was convicted of kidnapping and transporting a minor across state lines for the purposes of sexual activity and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Maybe it’s best not to think too hard about true crime documentaries that serve a therapeutic role for countless thousands of survivors of terrible things. Nor is the fact that they will never run out of content.