Desaparecida: O Caso Lucie Blackman

I know this story pretty well already, having read a few books on it. Tokyo Hostess, in particular, was well written and gave a lot of detail.

This documentary starts when Lucie has already disappeared, so there is no background to her life in Tokyo and her job working in the hostess club. It suffers greatly for this, as this is what would make the casual viewer care about her story.

Instead, it's her father, who I find seriously arrogant, who is star of this show. Not playing down that he lost his daughter, and obviously what happened to Lucie was evil, but I just couldn't deal with him throwing his weight around in another country. I know this won't be a popular opinion. Reading that he accepted a cash payment in hopes of a reduced sentence from a friend of the killer makes him look even worse, honestly.

Lucie took a silly risk to make easy money (again, in no way makes what happened to her okay). Father has the air of wealth, so not sure why he didn't just fund her holiday instead of letting her do that. Even a safe country has its issues.

There is a movie called the "earthquake bird" that takes a really similar tone and everything to this story and even worst because this is real life, the story of lucie was tragic indeed but there are so many others with stories similar to this one and no voice to speak up i think netflix should be doing more documentaries like this so we know about those sad cases there is a similiar active case about a 21 year old girl that flew to japan 16 years ago with a one way ticket and never return to this day no one knows anything about her i there are thousands stories like this we need more, but i agree that we needed to know more about lucie who she was.

The only thing I could personally think of throughout the entire thing was who in their right mind would let their 21 year old daughter go across the world to completely unknown place to work in a hardly legal semi anonymous dark place baiting old men for money, knowingly putting themselves in harm's ways.

The fact that the father never addressed that is baffling. World must had felt a safer place 20 years ago when no parent questioned this. I find this beyond comprehension. The fact that she disappeared less than a month into a job is scary. These are the issues that should had been addressed.

Has everything you'd want in a true crime documentary: a fascinating case, tons of archival footage, linear storytelling, very little (if any) re-enactments, a beautiful score and some stunning photography (Tokyo is a beautiful city). Not to mention interviews with the actual people involved. So many docs these days fail in at least one of these areas so it's nice to see one that does it all right for a change.

Obviously it's a sad case and a terrible situation for her family, so you can't fault her father for wanting answers. And that's another fascinating element to this case is the dynamic between her family (father, generally) and the Japanese police who handle things a bit differently than we're used to in the West.

Overall, one of the best true crime docs I've seen this year. Definitely recommend.

Extremely biased story telling, eluding many important facts of the story, including the father receiving 450k£ from the killer to limit his sentence, or the existence of her friend and colleague who had received a phone call from the killer on day one.

Only the father and cops are giving testimonies to re-write History, and skip all the aspects that could hurt Japanese police.

When you check who the director is, you understand the story is told in a way to clean Tokyo police image only.

Netflix should be ashamed of producing such content, without any fact checking, and depicting an absolutely misleading representation of the actual story.

Go on YouTube or listen to podcasts, you will have better quality content to understand the full story instead of wasting your time with this piece of propaganda.