It’s now just one month until Netflix’s most chilling true crime movie of 2026 is released. Starring Russell Crowe and Jacob Tremblay, this biographical thriller charts the rise and fall of one of the most infamous domestic terrorists in American history. It details both his prodigious career in mathematics, and his exposure as a politically-motivated serial killer decades later.
Based on the real life of Berkeley assistant professor Ted Kaczynski, Unabomber is directed by Janus Metz Pedersen, who previously helmed the true-story tennis drama Borg vs McEnroe. The movie connects its protagonist’s violent campaign of terror to the abuse he suffered at the hands of Harvard psychologist Henry Murray, who’s portrayed by Crowe.
In this sense, it feels like a twisted version of Good Will Hunting. On the other hand, the hunt for and eventual capture of Kaczynski has the ring of David Fincher’s Zodiac about it. Unabomber joins the vast collection of Netflix movies based on true stories, but it’s considerably darker than most of them.
The movie’s apparent empathy with its central figure makes it all the more disturbing. Although plot details about Unabomber are scarce ahead of the movie’s release on September 25, we know that it consists of two parallel timelines. One of them follows Ted Kaczynski’s formative years in the 1960s, while the other focuses on his eventual downfall in the 1990s.
Russell Crowe’s New Movie Unabomber Blends Good Will Hunting With Zodiac
Unabomber isn’t the first movie to be released about Kaczynski. However, unlike 2017’s Ted K: The Unabomber, it doesn’t center on his 18-year mail bombing campaign, and the socio-political philosophy he developed to justify these terrorist acts. Instead, the Netflix movie depicts his adolescence and early career as a mathematician, alongside the federal investigation into his crimes.
Two of the first-look images of Unabomber feature Russell Crowe, indicating that his character plays a major part in the film’s story. Henry Murray undertook brutal psychological experiments on Ted Kaczynski when he was just 17 years old. At the same time as Kaczynski took part in these experiments, he was a burgeoning math prodigy at Harvard.
If this premise sounds like the plot of Good Will Hunting, that’s no accident. Ted Kaczynski’s real life story famously inspired elements of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Oscar-winning screenplay for their coming-of-age story. Kaczynski even gets a mention in their movie, when psychologist Sean Maguire voices his concerns about pushing Will too hard to fulfill his academic potential.
Meanwhile, Unabomber’s criminal investigation achieves its breakthrough when The New York Times receives a letter demanding the publication of an essay justifying the bombing campaign of the movie’s protagonist. The correspondence between Kaczynski and a major newspaper mirrors the killer’s written communication with the San Francisco Chronicle in the 2007 crime thriller Zodiac.
Unabomber Is One Of Netflix’s Darkest True Crime Stories
Even though the true crime genre is renowned for telling horrifying real-life tales, true crime movies are rarely as dark as Netflix’s Unabomber. Its story combines cold-blooded, calculated acts of murder with their systematic rationalization in the writings of a brilliant scientist with a profound intellect.
But what really sets Unabomber apart is its examination of Ted Kaczynski’s harrowing adolescent experiences at the hands of Henry Murray. It depicts the cruel actions that helped to mold Kaczynski into a monstrous killer. At least, this is the theory implicit in the movie’s parallel narratives.
In real life, Kaczynski himself dismissed the idea that Murray’s experiments were a catalyst for the acts of terrorism he later committed. Yet, it’s certainly a compelling explanation, and one that grounds Unabomber as a biographical study which gets us to empathize with one of the most notorious criminals in the modern history of the United States.
- Release Date
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September 25, 2026
- Director
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Janus Metz
- Writers
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Nelson Greaves, Sam Chalsen
- Producers
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Sophie Cassidy
Cast
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Jacob Tremblay
Ted Kaczynski
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Shailene Woodley
Joanne Miller
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Annabelle Wallis
Christiana Morgan
