Unabomber Review: This Well-Acted Netflix Thriller Should've Stuck To One Timeline

Janus Metz Pedersen's "Unabomber" is a surprisingly effective Netflix thriller with a slick, stylish aesthetic and some genuinely intense performances that help it rise above your typical direct-to-streaming entertainment. It also unfortunately makes the miscalculation to focus on two different timelines when it should've stuck to one.

The movie serves as an origin story for Ted Kaczynski, the math genius who decided to revolt against the modern world by sending mail bombs, resulting in the deaths of three people and the injury of over 20 more. One storyline shows us Kaczynski as a young man at Harvard in the late 1950s, where he's played by an excellent Jacob Tremblay. The other storyline unfolds in the 1990s, as a determined FBI agent (Shailene Woodley) tries to catch the Unabomber before he strikes again.

The Harvard portion is the far more intriguing storyline — it feels fresh, whereas the FBI manhunt is the typical potboiler thriller stuff we've seen countless times before. Woodley's FBI character, Joanne Miller, is seemingly the only person smart enough to catch the Unabomber while her colleagues make one blunder after another. And Woodley is fine with the material she has to work with, but anytime the film cut to her storyline, my interest sagged. Thankfully, the bulk of the film follows Kaczynski as a 16-year-old Harvard student as he grows into the type of person who will eventually become a killer. "Unabomber" would've been far more successful had it jettisoned the FBI story entirely. 

Brilliant but disturbed, young Ted has plenty of thoughts about the state of the world, he just needs someone to listen. Enter Henry Murray, a psychology professor played by Russell Crowe, and his academic partner, Christiana Morgan (Annabelle Wallis, star of one of my favorite insane horror movies, "Malignant"). Crowe, who has left behind his glory days and entered an enjoyable "later-day Orson Welles" character actor phase of his career, is wonderfully sinister as Murray, who is secretly working with the CIA to conduct "Manchurian Candidate"-style experiments on students.

Murray and Morgan were real, and really did conduct experiments that were later criticized for being unethical. The real Kaczynski took part in them during his time at Harvard, too. What "Unabomber" proposes is these experiments unlocked a kind of madness within Kaczynski, encouraging him to become the terrorist we know him as today. (The real Kaczynski denied this connection.)

Whether or not the experiments really inspired Kaczynski to become the Unabomber is mostly immaterial to "Unabomber," which uses the concept to concoct an engrossing story about an angry young man finding his true calling. That calling just happens to be terrorism. Tremblay has been acting since he was very young and he's never quite played a role this intense, this disturbing. He's strong here, never giving in to lazy acting tics, playing Ted as a young man on the cusp of being pushed over the edge. Ted is seemingly incapable of relating to other human beings and his mind is too analytical to allow anything resembling imagination. He's like an alien inhabiting a human body — a pod person, as one character puts it, akin to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

The script, by Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves, doesn't go as deep as it should into Kaczynski's mind, and we don't come away knowing much about the man beyond his seething anger. But the intensity of the scenes where young Ted becomes more confident in his self-righteous hatred works hard to elevate the thin-ish script, as does the film's dark academia atmosphere as Ted inhabits shadowy, smoky rooms while Murray attempts to manipulate him. 

But "Unabomber" keeps losing momentum every time it cuts to that damn FBI storyline. The only interesting bit there involves the true detail about how Kaczynski's brother was the one who helped catch him, but this is presented as background noise for scenes where Woodley's character goes rogue to conduct her own investigation when her colleagues reject her theories. None of these moments ring true and feel like they've been ported over from a generic procedural show.

"Unabomber" deserves credit for coming across as better constructed than so many other forgettable Netflix originals (like these). I also have to confess that a sort-of twist (I'm being vague to avoid spoilers) that happens near the end of the film got me — I didn't see it coming, making for a satisfying reveal. "Unabomber" is by no means a prestige picture, but it's sturdy enough to get by on the strength of its performances.

/Film Rating: 6 out of 10

"Unabomber" is streaming on Netflix September 25, 2026.