UNABOMBER Review: Janus Metz's Harrowing 2026 Film

The film opens in the late 1950s, with a teenage Kaczynski arriving at Harvard on a scholarship, already more comfortable with equations than people. He is pulled into a psychological study run by Professor Henry Murray (Crowe), who subjects students to brutal, degrading interrogation sessions designed to break down their defenses. Metz shoots these sequences like a horror film - fluorescent lights, clinical silence, a boy's face slowly closing like a fist.

Decades later, FBI agent Joanne Miller (Shailene Woodley) is handed a stack of files on a string of package bombings targeting universities and airlines. The manhunt structure gives the film its second act, but Metz is less interested in procedure than in parallel obsessions - Miller's need to catch him, and Kaczynski's need to be heard. The two never share a scene until the final minutes, and the payoff lands mostly because of what the film withholds.

Metz, working from a script that blessedly avoids both hagiography and cartoon villainy, understands that the most frightening thing about Kaczynski isn't the bombs. It's the logic. The film patiently shows a young man who is gifted, awkward, and utterly unequipped for the casual humiliations of social life, then watches him calcify. The Harvard sequences are the film's strongest stretch, precisely because they resist easy causality. Murray's experiments didn't make Kaczynski a killer, the film suggests, but they taught him something corrosive about how power works.

Tremblay, now well past his child-actor years, is a revelation. He plays Kaczynski as a man running a constant internal calculation, his eyes darting, his jaw tight, his rare smiles arriving at the wrong moments. It's a performance of enormous restraint, and it could have curdled into tics. It doesn't.

Crowe, meanwhile, seems to relish playing a monster of a different kind - a respected academic who destroys young men and calls it science. He's avuncular, bored, faintly amused, and the film wisely refuses to give him a reckoning. Some people, Metz implies, simply get away with it.

The supporting cast is sturdy if underused. Woodley anchors the investigation with a weary competence that keeps the procedural passages from feeling like filler, and Annabelle Wallis makes a sharp impression as Murray's collaborator and confidante. Steven Ogg and Marc Menchaca fill out the field-office ranks with the kind of gruff authenticity that a lesser film would have flattened into caricature.

Where UNABOMBER falters is in its third act, when it briefly remembers it's supposed to be a thriller. A foot chase feels borrowed from a different movie. A late reveal about Miller's personal stake lands with a thud. The film is at its best when it's quiet, and it doesn't always trust that.

At 101 minutes, it's also lean to a fault. The final confrontation between Miller and Kaczynski crackles, but the film rushes to it, skipping over the years of isolation that hardened him in the first place. A longer cut might have deepened the tragedy. What's here is potent, but it leaves you wanting one more chapter.

Pros

• Jacob Tremblay's career-best performance, all tension and interiority
• Russell Crowe is quietly terrifying as Henry Murray
• Metz's clinical visual approach suits the material perfectly
• Avoids true-crime sensationalism in favor of psychological realism

Cons

• The thriller elements feel grafted on and undercut the mood
• Supporting characters are sketched thinly
• The rush to the finale skips crucial years of Kaczynski's radicalization

UNABOMBER is not an easy sit, nor should it be. It's a film about the making of a monster that refuses to let you off the hook with a tidy explanation, and it features two performances - Tremblay's and Crowe's - that will linger well past the credits. It doesn't quite stick the landing, but everything leading up to it is worth the discomfort.