Happy New Year, Losers: The Dangerous Rise of the Sympathy Doc

if I had my way I would tear this building down

Before their project begins, a documentarian reckons with at least as many ethical considerations as technical ones. For example: How much of a presence should the filmmakers have in the movie? What is the proper balance between respecting a subject and making sure the truth of it is shown? Will a deliberate narrative structure enhance the clarity of the film or inhibit it? A documentary is as much of a philosophical undertaking as an artistic one, and no two films will have the exact same set of answers to these and many other questions the form will ask of them.

Netflix’s Afflicted takes a different approach: it sends all those moral quandries straight to Hell and dives headfirst into a psychological thriller narrative that the filmmakers constructed more or less wholesale out of the experiences of its subjects. The show follows seven people burdened with curious maladies and asks if maybe these poor souls are not simply psychologically distressed and making it all up, or else maybe confusing their weird diseases for intense manifestations of more common ones. In other words, the hook of the show is essentially Are They Sick Or Are They Crazy?

This narrative trickery would almost be impressive if the impact of the show’s recklessness were not so blatantly contemptible. The program has been rightly, widely…