Midway through Chris Kasick’s documentary, Citizen Sleuth, the film’s subject reflects on a recent, botched interview with a police officer: “I don’t belong with journalists and I don’t belong with law enforcement. I’m floating somewhere in between.”
Such is the life of a true crime podcaster. The doc follows Emily Nestor, who creates the Mile Marker 181 podcast after a seemingly mysterious death in her Appalachian hometown inspires her to dig deeper. But rising popularity and compelling (albeit questionably true) threads and theories begin to taint the sincerity of her investigation. Soon, she starts chasing irrelevant leads — and just as many sponsorships — to the detriment of her credibility.
A disciple of Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line), Kasick creates a pendulum out of Citizen Sleuth. At first, we see Nestor as passionate, intuitive, and otherwise hard not to love. Her enthusiasm is infectious, while her exceptional delivery and captivating tone make it hard not to follow her down this path. Yet as she begins to learn more about forensic analysis and less about emotionally charged hearsay and gossip, the road she travels turns to gravel, then dirt and finally, nothing at all.
Kasick seamlessly hones this double-edged sword. He humors and challenges his subject without overtly intervening. It’s almost as though his commitment to the truth guides Nestor to her own sensible — though less tantalizing — conclusion. In doing so, he illuminates how drama can easily and fraudulently outweigh any sense of reality.
In less than an hour, Nestor shifts from compelling to insufferable. Still, Kasick never frames her as a hack or fraud. Rather, Citizen Sleuth explores how hard it can be to pursue the truth when fandom rears its head. We see Nestor at her first major convention, CrimeCon 2019. Quickly, she faces her popularity head-on. Her ego swells further when Nancy Grace approaches her for an interview. She’s understandably shocked, but without a clear conclusion to her story, one question lingers: How can she keep this going?
She simply can’t, as jarring as it sounds. She’s dragged through uncomfortable conversations with criminal experts and otherwise seasoned pros. It’s abrasive, sure, but Kasick doesn’t lean on some needless dramatic device or abrupt, narrative whiplash. Rather, we see Nestor gradually react, contemplate and ultimately come to terms with what lies ahead.
Perhaps Kasick’s greatest strength is his discipline and ability to showcase identical interviews in a different light. By the end of the film, for example, we learn what felt like a compelling conversation with the victim’s grandfather was essentially a ruse to try and desperately keep the podcast going. All it takes to shift this paradigm was a bit of candid, dashcam footage.
And that’s the power of Citizen Sleuth. It traces subtly different angles that transform perspectives and boldly question the true crime phenomenon. In other words, Kasick asks if the truth really matters when it’s devoid of intrigue. It also demonstrates how a talented, good-meaning and self-made storyteller can nearly drown in illegitimate waters.
Citizen Sleuth isn’t the first documentary to reframe its subject, but it stands among the best to do it subtly and organically. The doc challenges us as much as it does Nestor to question what we hear and if justice is the true crime audience’s real concern. Kasick cuts through the heart of the entertainment and illuminates how harrowing reality can be — even if it doesn’t end with a climactic scandal.
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