Stop us if you’ve heard this before, but there’s a true crime docuseries on Netflix that has tongues wagging. The appetite for such endeavors appears bottomless; it seems we really enjoy depraved and aberrant behavior so long as we can hit pause and take a bathroom break every now and then. But sometimes, a series will sneak through that offers more than titillation, cheap thrills, and hyperventilating aesthetics. And so, American Nightmare, a swift, concise piece of work that even mixes in a dash of investigative reporting verve. In short, it’s worth the hype.
It’s one of those stories you might remember from when it actually unfolded. In March 2015 a young man named Aaron Quinn called the police to report that his girlfriend, Denise Huskins, had been abducted from his home near the Bay Area city of Vallejo. His story was admittedly strange: soft-spoken, almost polite kidnappers wearing wetsuits made him drink a sedative, warned him not to call the cops, and mentioned a paltry ransom sum of $15,000. Said cops, whom Quinn eventually called, made it clear they thought Quinn was lying.
Then things got weird. Huskins reappeared in short order in her hometown of Huntington Beach, some 400 miles away, and claimed her captors had sexually assaulted her, threatening her family if she told anyone. Vallejo police and the FBI determined that she, too, was lying. The FBI agent in charge, David Sesma, allegedly assumed the couple had pulled a hoax inspired by the movie Gone Girl; the media took that theory and ran with it. Huskins and Quinn were buried in bad press.
The real story, chronicled here by directors Bernadette Higgins and Felicity Morris (The Tinder Swindler) with a firm sense of narrative pacing and visual restraint, is nowhere near as salacious, and if you don’t know the details, and wish to avoid spoilers, you might want to stop reading.
There is indeed a creepy villain here: a serial rapist and peeper named Mathew Moller, a disbarred lawyer and Iraq War veteran with all-American looks and an M.O. that included duct tape, sedatives, zip ties, and blacked-out goggles. But the menace that really stands out in the filmmakers’ depiction is law enforcement negligence, including a pattern of victim-blaming and ass-covering that let two innocent people twist in the wind out of arrogance and laziness.
Even if you take into account the bizarre details of Huskins’ abduction, which on the surface would seem to strain credulity, the revelations of how cavalierly local and federal police threw her and Quinn under the bus are alarming. Beneath American Nightmare’s attention-grabbing headlines is a tale of shameful systemic failure. (Here it should be noted that a Bay Area police detective who decided to investigate instead of make assumptions, Misty Carausu, emerges as a hero. If American Nightmare is an indictment of poor police work, it’s also an acknowledgement of good police work).
Higgins and Morris deserve plaudits on a number of fronts. First, they tell a compelling, thorough story in less than three hours, where a more sensationalist, diluted version of American Nightmare would have needlessly stretched out for five or six episodes (as these kinds of series often do). They create suspense in a way that doesn’t feel like withholding evidence, and they weave together their raw materials – interviews, interrogation footage, crisp reenactments – with a deceptively high level of craft. They don’t just know how to tell their story; they also know how to trust it, without the need of shock tactics and emotional manipulation.
American Nightmare is a strong offering from what has quickly become a tired and often tawdry documentary genre. Which is another way of saying it’s way better than it needs to be.
