Netflix ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ Season 4 Review - Catch Them If You Can

We always find ourselves tingling with excitement while talking about ghosts, unnatural phenomena, or mysterious happenings. Kids come across abandoned buildings and cook up supernatural stories. During sleepovers, friends often end up conversing about eerie experiences or mention a spooky incident involving a neighbor or someone else in their family. The fourth volume of Unsolved Mysteries successfully taps into our enthusiasm regarding macabre cases and stories. Its five episodes go from Jack the Ripper to a moth-like human entity. For the first time, I wasn't turned off by the recreations these documentaries indulge in to, well, recreate the crime. They surprisingly give some weight to the uncanny mood generated by the words of the interviewees. The recreations work well during the first episode when we are transported to 1888 to witness the shadowy figures of Victorian London. The citizens, especially the women engaged in casual prostitution, are seen on the streets at night while Jack the Ripper selects his targets and tears their flesh with a knife. Blood is spilled on the roads, organs go missing, and the police try to catch the culprit. The culprit, of course, is never caught, never identified. Look at the name of the show: It's Unsolved Mysteries.

All the cases are still open, and people are scratching their heads, looking again and again at the clues, the case files, to discover the identity of the criminals who have managed to escape justice. Amanda Antoni's body was found in the basement of her house in 2015. Has her husband committed this gruesome crime? Is the offender a stalker who could have been closely monitoring Amanda's routine? There is also the possibility that the whole thing could have been an accident. A teenager discovers an embalmed head in the woods in the third episode of this series. What's strange about this head is that red balls are present in the place of the eyes. Are the perpetrators a member of a satanic cult? What about that Jay guy who lives across the street? Something feels off about him. In Murder, Center Stage, a young, talented piano player is sexually assaulted and murdered on the stage of Kendall Hall's theater at Trenton State College. After much investigation, the suspects are narrowed down to two campus officers, but they all pass the polygraph test, and no blood is found on their batons. Years later, a female detective comes up with two solid suspects, yet there is insufficient evidence. Kendall Hall is described as a haunted place. Some people have apparently heard piano sounds coming from the building. According to a five-star Google review, Kendall Hall has "very comfortable seats, good acoustics, and a nice size." I wonder how comfortable the seats will be or how good the acoustics will feel if you step into the hall alone at night. The last episode focuses on a humanoid creature called Mothman. People living in the Point Pleasant area and even in some urban areas of Chicago have reportedly encountered this red-eyed monster with a shriek so loud it could shake or freeze your body. This is the weakest episode of this series because all the eyewitness accounts can be boiled down to this, "I was walking/driving at night, and Mothman appeared in front of me." It all sounds repetitive.

The stories are undoubtedly creepy, and Unsolved Mysteries sells them in a way that's meant to be tantalizing. Hence, whenever the talking heads started crying, I couldn't help but think about the deal they must have made with Netflix. Are they okay with - or even aware of - the fact that their tragedy is being delivered as entertainment for the audience? Don't they feel uncomfortable with the notion that people would "consume" their grief as "content?" Unsolved Mysteries tries to neutralize this thought by converting the (intimate) discussions into a plea for help. A text at the end of every episode asks us to share anything useful related to the case that has just been shown to us. Unsolved Mysteries is somewhat better than most of the Netflix documentaries, even though it shares a resemblance to them in terms of its style. Some people, after watching the show, might visit unsolved.com to share a tip. Others will either become detectives or just go through the episodes to pass their time.

Final Score – [6/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times