Murder on Middle Beach

What is interesting about this documentary is how a murder case turns into a dissection of a family full of secrets and accusations. The director's personal relationship may not be the most appropriate to approach the story, and there is a certain obsession with raising suspicions around some members of the family. In the end, it is a path to nowhere, a journey in circles that clarifies almost nothing.

This was really powerful not just in the subject that it was about but also in terms of making you think about the documentarian-subject relationship. There's a much closer emotional relationship here from the average true-crime docuseries that it hits different. There's this aspect of documentary filmmaking that is not often focused on, which is the side effects of dredging stuff up. Documentaries are always about uncovering new stuff, but every little thing that is uncovered creates side effects that are not always seen on camera. The filmmaking approach here is more delicate and the painstaking consideration towards the interviewees and how they come across in the doc made me reconsider other docuseries I've seen, and the line we draw between "this guy is a person of interest" and "this guy is a person".