There are two American rooms at the center of this film. One is a basement at Harvard around 1960, where a professor sits across from a sixteen-year-old and takes him apart on purpose. The other is a cabin in the Montana woods thirty years later, where federal agents finally close in on the man that boy became. Unabomber sets itself between those two rooms and asks which one is really the crime scene.

Directed by Janus Metz and arriving on Netflix, the film retells the case of Ted Kaczynski, the mathematician turned domestic terrorist known by the FBI codename UNABOM. Jacob Tremblay plays the young Kaczynski, the prodigy who entered Harvard at sixteen. Russell Crowe plays Professor Henry Murray, the psychologist who ran the study he was folded into. The premise puts the professor, not the bomber, at the film’s center of gravity.

That choice is the whole argument. Most screen versions of this story begin at the cabin and work outward through the manifesto and the manhunt. Metz begins earlier, in the place where an institution meant to educate a teenager instead enrolled him in something else.

The Harvard experiment was real. Between 1959 and 1962, Murray subjected a group of undergraduates to a series of deliberately hostile interrogations, sessions designed to attack the beliefs and self-image each student had written down in good faith. Kaczynski, one of the youngest in the group, sat through them for three years. Murray had spent the war assessing agents for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, and his campus work has been tied ever since — by some accounts firmly, by historians more cautiously — to the Cold War research culture that produced MKUltra.

Annabelle Wallis plays Christiana Morgan, Murray’s longtime collaborator and the co-author, with him, of a landmark personality test. Her presence signals that the film is interested in the apparatus around Murray, not just the man: a whole discipline that believed it could measure and remake a person, working on someone who had not yet turned seventeen.

The second timeline belongs to the hunt. Shailene Woodley plays Joanne Miller, an FBI agent leading the 1990s pursuit — a composite figure rather than a single real investigator, the film’s way of standing in for the task force that spent years chasing a suspect it could not name. Between 1978 and 1995, sixteen mail bombs killed three people and injured twenty-three, and for most of that stretch the Bureau had almost nothing: no face, no motive that fit, only a pattern.

What broke the case was prose. In 1995 Kaczynski demanded that newspapers publish his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, and when The New York Times and The Washington Post did, his brother David recognized the arguments and the phrasing. The tip led agents to the Montana cabin in April 1996. Kaczynski received a life sentence and died in federal custody in 2023.

Metz is not an obvious fit for a serial-killer thriller, which is what makes the casting of the film interesting on paper. He built his name on Armadillo, a documentary shot with Danish soldiers in Afghanistan, and on Borg vs McEnroe, a drama more concerned with what pressure does to a mind than with who wins. The material here leans toward reconstruction rather than spectacle — the interrogation as the event, the bomb as its aftershock.

The risk in any Unabomber project is the one the case has always carried: that explaining a man can slide into excusing him. Three people are dead, and no reading of Murray’s basement changes that. The more honest version of this story holds two facts at once — that a teenager was treated as raw material by the institution that was supposed to teach him, and that the adult who emerged chose to build bombs and mail them to strangers. The film’s dual structure is built to keep both in view without letting either off the hook.

It is also worth being clear about what this is not. It is not the 2020 documentary series Unabomber: In His Own Words, and it is not Ted K, the 2021 character study that stayed almost entirely inside the cabin. This is a scripted feature with a large cast — Alexander Ludwig, Steven Ogg and Marc Menchaca round out the ensemble — moving between Harvard in the early 1960s and the Montana woods of the 1990s.

Jacob Tremblay as a teenage Ted Kaczynski wired to a polygraph in Unabomber — Unabomber. Jacob Tremblay as Ted Kaczynski. Cr. Philippe Bosse/Netflix

The question it leaves open is the one no trial resolved. If the person who walked into Harvard at sixteen was not the same person who walked out, and if the difference was engineered, then responsibility becomes something a courtroom is poorly built to weigh. A verdict can end a manhunt. It cannot go back and un-run an experiment.

Unabomber, rated R, premieres worldwide on Netflix on September 25, 2026. Jacob Tremblay, Russell Crowe, Shailene Woodley and Annabelle Wallis lead a film directed by Janus Metz from a screenplay by Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves.

Tags: Netflix, true crime, Russell Crowe, Jacob Tremblay, Harvard, Ted Kaczynski