CODE RED
"We need to speak to you." Yeah you do. We're talking about Lucy Letby, the nurse who's about to be detained for some unspeakable crimes. Add some bodycam footage and a crying mother and well, you've got a pretty staggering way of opening a non-fictional, true events movie.
So yeah, my latest review is the nearly closed bookend, The Investigation of Lucy Letby, a documentary that causes the viewer to have an almost flip-flopped opinion. I mean did Lucy murder these infants or didn't she? And why is the girl so darn unforthcoming? And uh, what's up with the "no comment" shenanigans? "The only person who knows truly why is Lucy Letby herself." Uh-huh.
Letby, well she's a mystery, an enigma just like the docu itself. I would say you can't really see the wheels turning in her head so she's like a female Keyser Soze and/or a good old Anton Chigurh type from No Country for Old Men. She is matched only by Detectives Paul Hughes and Simon Blackwell, dudes who are relentless in proving Lucy's culpability. An interrogation here, a double arrest there, a push for Letby's life sentence. It's only in "Investigation's" last act do we realize that maybe it's you know, the hospital's fault and not Lucy's. "But when you delve deeper, things were not so straightforward." Yikes.
Usual Suspects characters and private dicks aside, The Investigation of Lucy Letby is directed by Dominic Sivyer, he of Rebel Nun and Masked Scammer fame. Sivyer shoots "Investigation" in the traditional Netflix style, streamlined and clean and sterile in its gape. With not-so-long-ago archives, interviews, and a 92-minute running time without an actual coda, The Investigation of Lucy Letby is a riddle wrapped inside a conundrum, begging for you to think about it long after the credits roll. "Depth probe."
Written by Jesse Burleson
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