Berlin 2021 Film Review – Ted K (2021)
From 1978 to 1995, America’s most notorious domestic terrorist killed three people and injured 22 in a deadly mail bombing campaign. Known as the Unabomber – created from UNABOM (for university and airline bomber), the FBI’s name for their investigation, which turned out to be the longest in American history – his motivation was ecological, a personal crusade against technology. Director Tony Stone’s Ted K paints a portrait of the killer and his personal world which points to other influences.
His name was Ted Kaczynski, a former mathematics prodigy who walked away from academia to live off the grid in the wilds of Montana. At the start of the film, he’s settled into the rigours of life in a small shack (built with the help of his brother, David), coping without electricity or running water, feeding himself off the land and scraping together money from menial jobs. The locals regard him as little more than a slightly strange eccentric, but he’s increasingly obsessed by the encroaching logging, airplane noise and their effect on the environment and, when his localised efforts to put a stop to them don’t have the desired effect, he has to think bigger. At the same time, his contact with his family – his mother and, more regularly, his brother – becomes increasingly fraught and unpleasant. He only calls them when he needs money.
It’s that relationship that seems to be at the root of his anger with the world around him. His mother is blamed for pushing him into academic life too early so that he never got past first base with a woman – an increasingly spiteful conversation carried out in a public phone box for all the world to hear. This is the early 70s, after all. His brother stands accused for having deserted him in favour of marriage and being dominated by his wife. The ultimate irony was that David became the key to Ted’s detection and arrest. When The Washington Post agreed to publish Kaczynski’s manifesto in return for an end to the bombing campaign, he recognised his brother’s writing style and tipped off the police.
The near-20 year story is dominated by Sharlto Copley in the title role with, for most of the time, his distinctive features buried deep under a shaggy beard and his usual South African tones replaced by a convincing American accent. He’s fierce, vengeful and angry, but there’s a touch of pathos in the shape of an attractive but purely imaginary love interest. Other characters are minor, with only a handful of lines, while the influence of Ted’s mother and brother is totally silent: we never hear their voices on the phone. The film, however, never sets out to court our sympathy, especially in the bombing scenes, which become increasingly graphic and made all the more cold blooded when they, too, happen in silence.
Even the legions of true crime fans might find this a hard watch. That’s not so much because of the subject matter but because of its tendency to take its time when it doesn’t need to. The camera lingers for too long as Ted roams the woods and tracks and our knowledge of the outcome makes it feel all the more slow. That aside, it’s still a fascinating look inside the mind of somebody who was, and never could be, happy with life and found nothing to give him pleasure. Throughout the entire film, he only smiles once.
★★★1/2
Drama, Bio-pic | Cert: tbc | Berlin Film Festival | Dir. Tony Stone| Sharlto Copley, Drew Powell, Amber Rose Mason.
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