Tony Stone directs an expressionistic portrait of Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber.
Shot largely in the secluded mountains outside Lincoln, Mont., where the real Theodore J. Kaczynski lived before his arrest by the F.B.I. in 1996, “Ted K” is a blinkered portrait of the infamous domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber.
The director Tony Stone — whose 2016 documentary “Peter at the Farm” also put the spotlight on a mean (if far less sinister) recluse — dramatizes Kaczynski’s psychological state throughout the 17 years he spent building and sending bombs that killed three and injured dozens more. Sections from Kaczynski’s extensive writings are narrated in voice-over like drifting thoughts by Sharlto Copley (“District 9”), who takes on the titular role with vulnerability and palpable fury. As Kaczynski learns how to construct more sophisticated weapons, we observe his brief interactions with the outside world — his perpetual struggle with a finicky public phone booth, his irregular conversations with his concerned mother and the brother whose marriage he resents.
The film is a tad reductive, leaning too heavily on currently fashionable explanations for why lonely white men resort to violence. But Stone makes up for it with some magnificently eerie moments.
An original score by the electronic artist Blanck Mass, anachronistically interwoven with classical numbers by Vivaldi, certainly helps, creating a mood of grandiose delirium. Filled with menacing slow zooms and fade transitions, the film nevertheless feels inconsistent when it jerks back and forth from stylized depictions of Kaczynski’s crimes, building him up as a kind of anti-villain badass, to a tone of gentle, ultimately sympathetic mockery — as when Kaczynski begins courting an imaginary girlfriend.
The script’s emphasis on Kaczynski’s relentless bachelorhood and his feelings of castration is too neat an explanation. More convincing is the film’s expressionistic fixation on the technologies that torment Kaczynski — the ugly roar of dirt bikes, snowmobiles and tree-razing bulldozers. In one remarkable dream sequence, we see Kaczynski seemingly shooting through the space-time continuum, looking small and terrified and like the kind of man who would kill to feel a sense of control.
Ted K
Rated R for nudity, language and stylized violence. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
