Errol Morris has long been obsessed with unanswerable questions, with conflicting accounts of events, and with rabbit holes that only seem to lead to other rabbit holes. He does, occasionally, find answers, as he did with his landmark 1988 film The Thin Blue Line, which played a major role in getting an innocent man off death row. But in recent years, he’s seemed even more interested in exploring why, exactly, it’s so difficult to answer questions and to really prove one theory over another.
A case that has no shortage of theories is that of Charles Manson, and this is where Morris has turned his attention in his latest film, called Chaos: The Manson Murders. The movie adapts journalist Tom O’Neill’s book that dives into the bizarre possibilities surrounding Manson and how he got people to do his horrifying work, arguing against the commonly believed Helter Skelter scenario, and raising the prospect of a secret CIA mind-control experiment, which Morris looked at in detail in his 2017 miniseries Wormwood.
Morris conceived this film as a miniseries, too, before Netflix decided they just wanted a standalone movie, and the director’s initial idea was the correct one—he has to pack a lot into not much time. When he’s able to talk about our collective fixation on Manson and O’Neill’s wild, surprisingly compelling theories, we’re absorbed. Less so when he spends far too long describing the murders themselves, which he has to know isn’t something a person watching this really needs, and it makes me wonder about the creative pressure Netflix exerted. I wonder, too, about the movie’s tone—Morris’s unique, immediately recognizable style is there, but more sensationalized than we often see, as if maybe he wasn’t the only chef in the kitchen.
But that’s not something I can really know, which seems appropriate for this film, as we reach no conclusions by the end, and continue on with only more questions. And that’s just what we’ve come to expect from Errol Morris.
Chaos: The Manson Murders is on Netflix.
