By Owen Gleiberman
Variety
May 3, 2019

To say that child sex abuse in a documentary could in any way be connected to that Hitchcock/thriller word —  suspense — is, on the face of it, an offensive thought. We’re talking despicable crimes that reverberate for years and even for generations; they don’t exist for our “entertainment.” Yet “Capturing the Friedmans,” the remarkable movie Andrew Jarecki made in 2003 — it is, along with Amy Berg’s “Deliver Us from Evil” (2006), the most staggering documentary of our time about child sex abuse — unveiled a situation of unfathomable suspense, of sinister layered mystery. It turned the audience into detectives and left us pondering questions, long after the film was over, of what, exactly, went on in it. Jarecki used the dramatic lure of the things we didn’t know, and were craning our necks around corners to see, as a metaphor for how child sex abuse can haunt its victims, tearing away at memory and identity. The suspense of “Capturing the Friedmans” was that it turned watching a documentary into the mirror of a victim’s journey.

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