Beware The Slenderman

Compelling documentary.... Director Irene Taylor Brodsky utilizes police interrogation footage and interviews with the pair's families to craft not a tale about imaginary monsters, but about the far more terrifying subject of real-life mental-health issues. [27 Jan 2017, p.54]

While Beware the Slenderman isn’t an easy watch--and will undoubtedly inspire anxiety and panic in some viewers, particularly parents--it’s a worthy one that helps make sense of a senseless crime.

Brodsky resists the temptation to judge, and instead sheds light on her subjects, and all their complexity.

It's a serious--and seriously disturbing--piece of work about a pair of 12-year-old Wisconsin girls who, inspired by a creepy internet meme, lured a friend into the woods after a birthday party and stabbed her 19 times.

A late-in-the-film reveal throws a new light over the entire situation, one that both goes a long way toward explaining things but also illuminating the danger of pat answers to thorny tragedies that belie such solutions. It’s clear why Brodsky held it back; it would have offered an Occam’s razor of rationalization to something the director feels shouldn’t be explicable.

The documentary does a good job of filling you in on the Slenderman mythos and how it has spread.

That Slender Man also seems evil serves to enhance, rather than lessen, his power over the imagination. But that power also comes from the belief that Slender Man is real-- and it’s in grappling with this troubling issue that the documentary makes its darkest, most complicated point. ... At two hours, it contains a bit too much footage of the backs of people’s heads in a courtroom, when it could be delving deeper into other topics related to the girls’ case.