“Something bad is about to happen.”
(Spoilers for Don’t F**k With Cats, if you’ve yet to watch it, etc.)
In 2014, Luka Magnotta was found guilty of first degree murder.
The Canadian had killed and dismembered a man he met on Craigslist, sending some of the body parts to members of his country’s respective conservative and liberal parties.
He also filmed the entire thing.
But it wasn’t this footage – shared far and wide across the internet – that gained Magnotta his notoriety in the first place.
It was the videos he had taken of himself torturing cats – and the reaction they had garnered from fury-filled, totally determined online animal rights groups.
Netflix’s latest true crime offering is the aptly-named – albeit slightly misguided – Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer.
The number one rule of the internet as told by those who frequent it, the film follows the intense, straining work of online sleuths as they desperately try to discover the location and identity of an anonymous man who likes to kill cats.
And eventually, kill people.
Two hours into Don’t F**k With Cats, I took a moment to reflect on what I seen and discovered that the distance between the point I had reached and where the series had started was considerable. And absolutely mad.
What had begun as an almost quirky profile of internet detectives, fake Facebook profiles and a generalised outrage around animal abuse had become a national murder case – one where body parts were being mailed to government officials and torsos were being discovered in suitcases.
Clip via Netflix
Despite this seemingly jarring jump in tone, Don’t F**k With Cats is a slow burn.
A story that could probably be told in half the time (but hey, what true crime Netflix documentary doesn’t fall victim to this fate these days?), the series takes its time.
It draws the viewer in with its detailed and meticulous examination of internet culture, eventually ending up in a place where suddenly the forum user is better suited to solve the case than the police officers assigned to it.
The detail is rife and the story is long but the documentary’s length is almost justified by the craziness of the case (except maybe for episode three; that is one drawn-out hour).
Rush it and miss the the magnitude – and sheer madness – of the story. Regardless, you won’t be able to believe a single moment.
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