Inside the Criminal Mind

Note to director..it is 2018, not 1997.

Melodramatic deep-voiced narrator. Badly staged re-enactments. Loud, obtrusive music.

Avoid.

You get tossed back and forth between different cases in every episode. The music is a primitive rip-off og all horror movies ever made. One of the interviewees even says without correcting herself that Fritzl was in Germany.

Netflix should feel ashamed

The worst mess is the Branch Davidian story. Did no one check their facts or even see other accurate documentaries. Pure white wash and bad work. One sided perspectives without a range of information. Things started out well but slowly petered out like a bad clogged drain. Waste of time.

The video quality and editing are awful. I couldn't even get through half of the first episode after listening to the narrator mispronounce so much of the necessary terminology. Also the narration script is worded extremely poorly. There is clearly no fact checking, as they got so much information incorrect. I have seen youtube videos on this subject done way better.

I started watching the docuseries with high expectations. Albeit some mistakes. the first episode on serial killers is not entirely bad. It integrated nicely some forensic models about the serial killers' motives and overall background. Also introducing cutting edge neuroimaging studies that suggest some neuroanatomical and functional differences between serial killers' brain versus the 'normal' population's brains. In my opinion this is the only marginally good episode.

However, all the other episodes were utterly bad. They seem more like a summary of the crimes committed rather than an in-depth analysis of the CRIMINAL MIND. The narrator just gives glimpses to the different crimes perpetrated by different individuals and groups without much in-depth analysis. They are also tied together chaotically and sometimes even makes it hard to understand about which case they are talking at that precise moment (especially during the kidnappers episode).

Additionally, the docuseries has so many mistakes and inconsistencies regarding the cases. Like when they showed a newspaper which said 'Josef Fritzl' Australian man (he was AUSTRIAN) or when they narrated that 'plata o plomo' was a phrase coined in Mexico (no, it was coined by Colombian mafias). Furthermore, as a Colombian I felt that Pablo Escobar's portrayal was superficial and glib. There were so many actions he committed that can be used to analyze the psychopathic crime lord's mind but the docuseries did not touch upon any of these. In the end the 'psychological' observations regarding the criminal mind of crime lords was that: they came from poor families, do charitable work to manipulate their communities, are cold-blooded and can be criminals whilst also appearing normal and having families. This is not much of a trip inside the criminal mind...

All in all, the docuseries was a painful watch. Very shallow, more like a sensationalist summary of crimes. It does not venture you inside the criminal mind as its title suggests. The idea is very interesting in itself and I had wished for a in-depth analysis of the individuals behind these heinous crimes.