Somewhere around the half-way mark, the new Netflix true crime documentary series — American Nightmare — transcends the trappings of its often reductive genre, and turns into something else entirely. It’s a scathing critique of modern-day policing, a glimpse at everyday patriarchy, and towards the end, a moving love story. But perhaps most satisfyingly, it’s significantly better than the scores of other true crime series that the streamer funnels down our throats on a bi-weekly basis.
From Bernadette Higgins and Felicity Morris, the women behind The Tinder Swindler — itself an uncommonly well-made example of the genre — American Nightmare revisits a case that briefly made headlines in 2015, and earned comparisons to the book and film Gone Girl. A young woman named Denise Huskins — blonde, all-American — was reported missing by her jock boyfriend Aaron Quinn. He claimed to have been held captive by masked intruders who kidnapped Denise and drove off with her, leaving him bound, gagged and sedated.
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Aaron alerted the police when he came to, but was immediately placed under suspicion for telling what sounded to them like a hare-brained story. Why in the world would anybody kidnap Denise at all? Why would they tell Aaron, over email no less, that they want a mere $15,000 as ransom money? And what about Aaron’s confession to (emotionally) cheating on Denise because he wanted to get back with an ex? Almost as if they were seeing flashes of Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, the police made it clear that they were going to zero in on Aaron, who kept asserting that he was telling the truth. One cop even threatened to paint Aaron as a ‘monster’.
The story gained further traction when Denise suddenly reappeared at her family home, hundreds of miles from where she was taken, 48 hours after she went missing. Clearly traumatised, she went underground, and asked for some time to gather her thoughts before being interrogated about what had happened over the past two days. The cops weren’t having it; they made the quick decision to throw her and Aaron under the bus for what they decided was an elaborate hoax. Mere hours after Denise reappeared, they held a press conference and accused her of wasting government resources by leading them on a wild goose chase.
American Nightmare features both Aaron and Denise recounting their experiences in painstaking, often harrowing detail. The show also includes a wealth of enlightening interrogation footage, inputs from their lawyers, as well as interviews with a handful of police officers and one journalist who covered the case. Higgins and Morris spin a gripping yarn, a doubly difficult task in documentary form because each person on camera already has a 360 view of the story before they’ve uttered a single word. The trick, then, is to cherry pick the key moments, settle on a structure, and assume that viewers don’t have any prior knowledge of the case.
But while these are mainly stylistic achievements, the most impressive aspect of American Nightmare, which makes confident strides away from genre conventions as it goes along, is the tone that the filmmakers have taken with this complex story. They could, for instance, have chosen to make it a procedural. And how often have we seen shows like this lean into salaciousness? There was room for that here, too. But American Nightmare is perhaps as level-headed about a real-life tragedy as something like this can be.
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It’s astonishing, and even a little heartwarming, how Denise and Aaron kept their heads despite being dragged mercilessly by the press. But in addition to calling out the media’s prejudiced coverage of the case, the show also pulls up the equally complicit public for being perpetually desperate to identify new villains in society, if only to delude themselves into thinking that they’re morally superior. Even Amazing Amy from Gone Girl was spared this level of indignity, and she was an actual criminal.
American Nightmare
Directors – Bernadette Higgins, Felicity Morris
Rating – 4/5
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