Our Highest Rec: We’re Obsessed with Crime, and Casting JonBenet Tells Us Why

Our Highest Rec is when the staff proposes something they find underappreciated, undervalued, or underrated. It's an excuse for us to push our opinions on you.

Sickos have no shortage of entertainment now. Wake up early and listen to a half-hour of the Up and Vanished podcast as you prepare for work. During your commute, pop on a longer episode of something like S-Town or Convincted. When you take lunch, you can read up on Netflix’s The Keepers or Dear Zachary, and after you cross your threshold and crash for the night, you can load up a crime-ish series like The Night Of, 13 Reasons Why, Making A Murderer, Big Little Lies, or The Jinx. Amid this crime-heavy moment in pop culture, we have a lot of options for stories about people being killed or going missing, and it makes sense given our natural tendencies to spell out theories and speculate about people and pick things apart on the internet. We’re all kind of sickos now, and it feels okay because you know everyone else is kind of a sicko too.

Casting JonBenet came out on Netflix on April 28. It’s an 85-minute documentary that deals peripherally with the JonBenet Ramsey murder case from 1990. Here’s the Wikipedia page on that one; it’s a wild dive. The Ramsey case was zeitgeisty in a way similar to Casey Anthony’s, so by this point, Casting JonBenet assumes we know the story. Thus, it takes a different tack to discussing the crime.

The premise of Casting is pretty simple: The producers of the documentary auditioned a bunch of people in JonBenet’s hometown for a reenactment of the crime, and the movie is basically just compiled footage from the audition Q&As. It’s super unique. The whole thing is talking heads, and while it becomes a bit repetitive and you might wonder “what are we doing here,” it deserves some props for being less about crime, and more about why we’re obsessed with crime. Thus, it carves its place amid the landscape wrought by Making A Murderer and Serial. In that way, it’s a really shrewd movie.

There are a lot of things you shouldn’t say to someone who’s going through something terrible, but one thing we all probe for on a consistent basis is the “I know how you feel” tactic­. Your mom was diagnosed with cancer? Ugh, I remember when my uncle had his lymphoma scare. Your home was broken into? Man, I felt the same way when that guy took the CDs out of my car. We always try to empathize by shoving ourselves into other people’s situations. It’s well-intentioned, usually—we’re the same, I’m in this with you—but regardless it comes across as selfish and a bit fraudulent.

This works within the lower stakes of media, too. How often do we like things because “it speaks to us” or we relate to it? Think of all the young people you know who fell in love with La La Land because, oh my gosh, that’s how it feels when I’m trying to chase my dreams, or all the people who binge Friends because, like, that’s totally us! We want to be a part of things, even if those things are objectively calamitous and costly, like loss. There’s a more complicated psychological dynamic at play here, but to stay in the realm of the layman, we like being the same as other people. It makes us feel like we have connections.

Casting JonBenet is about that. As the audition interviews progress, the conversation turns from “what do you remember about the Ramsey case” to moments that feel a little more unprompted. The actors start drawing parallels between themselves and the murder of JonBenet. One actor had a brother who was murdered. Another actor knows someone who died (…). Another actor knew someone who knew the neighbor who might have seen something suspicious the night the police came to the Ramsey house. The quotes range from fascinating to a tiny bit gross. Sometimes you feel self-righteous in your “heh, look at the people insert themselves where they don’t belong” attitude, but other times you feel downright uncomfortable—yeesh, just leave it all alone. Casting might not be a mind-blowing piece of work, but it makes you feel things a more straightforward crime documentary doesn’t.

And a final important note: Without spoiling the ending of Casting JonBenet, you should know it takes a functional shift that feels like someone’s picking at a scab. It’s not painful, but it has a primal enthralling quality that makes you feel equal parts complicit, guilty, and riveted. It’s beautiful, but it’s complicated in a potentially negative way, too.

Regardless, the movie secures its place amid the world of true-crime obsessions. The murder-mystery, missing-person, cold-case landscape right now is full of voyeuristic windows into other people’s tragedy, but Casting JonBenet looks to defy that dynamic by holding up a mirror. It makes you wonder why you love all this stuff in the first place, and that has legitimate complementary value next to all the Stephen Averys and Adnan Syeds we can’t stop thinking about. The documentary is striking and moving, even if, when it’s all over, you realize the mirror goes two ways. We’re forced to think about ourselves because we are positioned against others doing exactly the same thing.