If you’ve binged Squid Game already (and, let’s face it, who hasn’t?) then you might well be in search of your next Netflix obsession.
While nothing is likely to capture our attention quite as thoroughly as the South Korean survival drama, there is a documentary that is getting a fair amount of buzz and could be the next title on many people’s binge-list.
The Motive is a four-part true-crime documentary that walks viewers through the deaths of the Cohen family, all shot in their beds while asleep, by a 14-year-old boy. That’s right, the perpetrator was just 14-years-old, and he murdered his family with a rifle in 1986, telling investigators that a green monster had entered his mind and told him to kill everyone at home.
The tragedy, which took place in the Ein Kerem neighbourhood of Jerusalem, left so many unanswered questions as detectives and psychiatrists alike tried to understand why the young man committed such a horrific crime, to no avail.
The docuseries features interviews with judges, lawyers, a journalist, police, doctors, and even prosecutors at the home for offenders, where the boy served time for six years and no one can answer the question of why he did what he did.
The boy, who was never named by the media as he was a minor when the murders occurred, is now a grown man with a wife and children of his own. In the docuseries, he reenacts his actions at the crime scene as a part of an investigation and says that he was under someone else’s control and if he was fine he would have never murdered his family.
A word of warning, some of the scenes and descriptions in The Motive may be distressing for some viewers to watch, particularly as Avi Samuel, a youth investigator for the Israeli Police Department, describes in graphic detail what he saw when he was called to the scene of the crime. He describes with great specificity what the victims looked like after they were shot point-blank in the face with an M-16, which is disturbing, to say the least.
The Motive is the latest offering in Netflix’s true crime offering and is definitely one to add to your watchlist if you are a fan of the genre. Maybe just be prepared to watch a few episodes of a comedy afterwards for a palette cleanser though as this one is pretty grim.
The Motive is now streaming on Netflix. Check out the trailer below.
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