14 Sep Unknown Number: The High School Catfish (2025)

What’s known and unknown

There’s a story here that many folks find interesting: in a tiny US town, hundreds of disturbing text messages are sent to a teen couple, and then later focusing on the girl. School chums are suspected, accused. Turns out to disturbingly be the girl’s mother. Viewers are able to write their own judgement on this mom.

This is a documentary. No re-enactors are employed; some police body cams are used. Many interviews.

I found this unsettling for reasons unassociated with the horror of the story. I am attuned to long form narrative, where everything is engineered for an effect. I engage with these effects in a contract with the writer/filmmaker. That contract is holy, with us entwined in an exploration of structured reality.

Documentaries are different. Though they use similar media, the idea is more like journalism. The ‘story’ has organically emerged from life, and we peer in. In theory, the filmmaker is there as neutral conveyance, shaping only to provide focus of what’s naturally there.

So I have a hard time when the two are folded together. Here, the story and people are real, but the actual story uses them and the events in a highly sculptured way. I have a hard time sorting out how to approach and absorb it.

The events roll out over a couple years. Title cards tell us when, and we see interviews from the participants explaining what it going on. The story has several chapters, and we get the events reported as they happened. Or so it seems. What we really see is the participants in a much later context. They already know the whole story we will see. They aren’t telling us what just happened; they are pretending to be in that chapter.

There’s been a conspiracy between the ‘victims’ and the filmmaker to recreate the past. It is real in the sense that they lived it, but it does not seem fair to the viewer. As the film progresses, we notice that in every era, the clothes and interview room stay the same.

These are small town, poorly educated people who got caught up in the drama and are active participants in the damage in many ways.

Now the offending Mom went to prison and was released. We hear her story, designed to evoke strong feelings in us. I suppose that part works. But we’ve also heard maybe ten other stories as well, each one through the protection of self-interested memory shaping.

That is, the filmmaker came on this story after it ended, and pieced together what we see from some body cam footage and self-interested recollections. I find this very hard to absorb, the chaos of self-interest pretending to be reality.

Posted in 2025

Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

IMDB