ted k unabomber movie review

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“Ted K” trumpets its authentic bona fides early, informing us in an opening crawl that it was shot on the actual Montana land where Ted Kaczynski’s 10-by-12-foot cabin once stood, where he lived his spartan life and crafted the manifesto that would earn him the moniker The Unabomber. We also learn that director Tony Stone and his co-writers, Gaddy Davis and John Rosenthal , used Kaczynski’s own words from his 25,000 pages of writing to build their script.

The Unabomber viewed the encroachment of technology as a crucial force in destroying the natural world. He wrote about it, he raged about it. He’s currently serving a life sentence in federal prison for his deadly efforts to stop it. Lest we have any doubt about his philosophy, we hear him lay it out in an opening voiceover from star Sharlto Copley : “Modern technology is the worst thing that ever happened to the world, and to promote its progress is nothing short of criminal.” And of course, the Washington Post published his manifesto in June 1995 in hopes of preventing further terrorist violence.

And yet, while Copley is on screen for nearly the entirety of “Ted K,” which follows Kaczynski in the years leading up to his arrest, the man himself remains inherently unknowable—fearsome and fascinating but just out of reach. His performance is tightly coiled and increasingly twitchy as Ted struggles to maintain his composure and dares to execute more and more violent acts against those he views as his aggressors. “I have a plan for revenge,” he says in the nasally narration of his journals. “I want to kill some people, preferably a scientist, a communist, businessman or some other big shot.” What he thinks is clear; who he is, less so.

That’s probably by design. Despite the shocking acts on display in “Ted K,” we feel like we’re in a bit of a haze as we wander the woods with Kaczynski, watching him run shirtless and shoot at helicopters. Stone favors the subtlest of pushes into his subject matter, or uses slow-motion to contrast with the significance of a moment of truth, as when Kaczynski mails off one of his deadly, explosive packages with Alice in Chains’ “Rooster” blaring in the background. The noise of chopping, sawing, and shearing from the nearby logging industry creates a pesky rhythm. And the droning, synth score from British composer Benjamin John Power , known as Blanck Mass , adds greatly to the film’s overall hypnotic vibe. Just as the din surrounding Kaczynski swells to a panicky cacophony, so, too, do the music and sound design grow to heighten our feeling of anxiety.

But some of the tensest moments in the film are actually the most mundane, as when Kaczynski confronts a phone company clerk about losing coins in the pay phone. An airplane crosses the blue sky overhead, shattering the reverie of his peace and quiet, and you can feel the anger rising within him. And a seemingly innocuous trip to the local library reveals that he’s looking up the names and addresses of tech executives to target them.

Increasingly, though, Stone relies on fantasy sequences to signify Kaczynski’s break with reality and sanity, which feels unnecessary. We see a pretty and pleasant woman named Becky ( Amber Rose Mason ) who appears magically and just happens to be interested in all the things he likes to do, such as bike riding and fishing. We already know he’s lonely—he complains about how little experience he’s had with women in his agitated, one-sided phone calls with his mother and brother—but the arrival of this sunny, imaginary figure into Kaczynski’s moody cocoon becomes a distraction.

Still, Copley’s performance remains riveting throughout. It’s a testament to his delivery and physicality that we can hear Kaczynski speak expansively about what he’s going to do, and we can watch him experiment with various explosives, and we’re still on edge, wondering what might happen. His squirrelly nature makes him unpredictable, even as he sits quietly in his cozy cabin, listening to classical music on the Montana NPR station, planning who he’ll try to kill next.

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Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Ted K (2022)

Rated R for language, some sexual content and brief nudity.

120 minutes

Sharlto Copley as Ted

Drew Powell as Tom

Bob Jennings as Carter

Christian Calloway as Tommy

Tahmus Rounds as Tommy Sauerkraut

Sal Rendino as Gilbert

Amber Rose Mason as Becky

Wayne Pyle as Gary Dryce

Gaddy Davis
John Rosenthal

Cinematographer

Nathan Corbin
Ethan Palmer
Robert Mead
Blanck Mass

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‘Ted K’ Review: An Eerie Descent

Tony Stone directs an expressionistic portrait of Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber.

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By Beatrice Loayza

Shot largely in the secluded mountains outside Lincoln, Mont., where the real Theodore J. Kaczynski lived before his arrest by the F.B.I. in 1996, “Ted K” is a blinkered portrait of the infamous domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber.

The director Tony Stone — whose 2016 documentary “Peter at the Farm” also put the spotlight on a mean (if far less sinister) recluse — dramatizes Kaczynski’s psychological state throughout the 17 years he spent building and sending bombs that killed three and injured dozens more. Sections from Kaczynski’s extensive writings are narrated in voice-over like drifting thoughts by Sharlto Copley (“District 9”), who takes on the titular role with vulnerability and palpable fury. As Kaczynski learns how to construct more sophisticated weapons, we observe his brief interactions with the outside world — his perpetual struggle with a finicky public phone booth, his irregular conversations with his concerned mother and the brother whose marriage he resents.

The film is a tad reductive, leaning too heavily on currently fashionable explanations for why lonely white men resort to violence. But Stone makes up for it with some magnificently eerie moments.

An original score by the electronic artist Blanck Mass, anachronistically interwoven with classical numbers by Vivaldi, certainly helps, creating a mood of grandiose delirium. Filled with menacing slow zooms and fade transitions, the film nevertheless feels inconsistent when it jerks back and forth from stylized depictions of Kaczynski’s crimes, building him up as a kind of anti-villain badass, to a tone of gentle, ultimately sympathetic mockery — as when Kaczynski begins courting an imaginary girlfriend.

The script’s emphasis on Kaczynski’s relentless bachelorhood and his feelings of castration is too neat an explanation. More convincing is the film’s expressionistic fixation on the technologies that torment Kaczynski — the ugly roar of dirt bikes, snowmobiles and tree-razing bulldozers. In one remarkable dream sequence, we see Kaczynski seemingly shooting through the space-time continuum, looking small and terrified and like the kind of man who would kill to feel a sense of control.

Ted K Rated R for nudity, language and stylized violence. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon , Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.

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The movie's merits might be debatable, but Sharlto Copley ensures Ted K is never less than grimly compelling.

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Alongside writers Gaddy Davis ( Peter and the Farm ) and John Rosenthal ( Out of Our Minds ), director Tony Stone ( El Monte ) crafted a searing portrayal of environmentalism gone deadly wrong. The morals of the Unabomber are published and he is in prison to this day, but the magic of Ted K is Sharlto Copley's portrayal of Ted Kaczynski filling in all the gaps. It's not just about Kaczynski’s lifestyle, but the mindset that led him down such a destructive path. At two hours long, Ted K drags at points but is never held down for long. The filmmaking is very strong, but it's Copley’s performance that sells it.

Ted Kaczynski (Copley) has lived off of the land for years and takes great pride in his detachment from technology and affinity for nature. However, he is far from altruistic. In fact, he is a misogynist, unable to keep a steady job, and relies on his family for money. He has the audacity to berate them with the same moral high ground he inflicts on society while begging them for money. All that being said, Ted is totally committed to the environment and its maintenance. So when dirt bikers drive onto his property, he throws rocks at them. When jets fly over the forest he lives in, he shoots at them… not so typical environmentalism. Ted has had enough and eventually begins locating and targeting his enemies — big oil, news corporations, and Penthouse magazine just to start.

Related: Ted K Trailer Shows Sharlto Copley’s Chilling Take on the Unabomber

At first, he just wanted to know if he was capable of using his Harvard degree to fashion a bomb. When he discovers the answer is yes, it is a crooked ride to the bottom as Ted begins mailing bombs across America for the next decade. Ted Kaczynksi turned his back on society and the world, which is fitting because he was active from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. It's been a long enough time that the word Unabomber is at best a flashpoint in history for some, but Ted K encapsulates the fear that still lingers at the mention of his name. Copley's performance is top notch. He is feverish with nervous energy, never calm and, on the rare occasions when Ted is comfortable, Copley is bleeding out of his eyeballs.

Ted only contacts his family when he needs money and when he does it's with the air of someone who thinks they know everything. Copley holds nothing back, declaring that industrialism will be the death of them all. His delivery doesn’t carry an ounce of self pity — rather, there is mirth as he cackles to the tune of his own psychosis. Even in moments where is just listening to the radio, Copley is wide-eyed and present as a radical environmentalist preaches, “Human beings are just another species among millions of others.”

As Copley delivers a mountain of exposition in a phone booth, Stone is fully aware viewers need a glass of direction to swallow a pill that large. The camera begins to spiral as Ted does. In constant 360-degree motion, save for cutting to close-ups, the scene starts with Ted begging for money so the camera relaxes before circling him like a pack of wolves. By the end of the scene, he is blaming his mother for his virginity and the camera is running around him at the speed of a Formula 1 race car.

With Ted K , Stone has easily made his best film to date. The director evokes empathy — within reason — in scenes where he follows the beauty of nature in the same shot Ted is overcome with hopelessness at the world and unloads bullets into a helicopter ready to drop a bomb in the name of natural gas. What Copley seems to be so aware of is that Ted is trying so hard to be what he wants (that is normal to him) instead of even considering being himself. Both the performance, the man, and the motive can be summarized when authorities approach Ted and he says, “I wouldn’t call it anything out of the ordinary though. I imagine if you were in my position you might act the same way."

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Ted K is in theaters and on demand February 18, 2022. The film is 120 minutes long and rated R for language, some sexual content, and brief nudity.

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‘Ted K’ Review: Sharlto Copley Is the Unabomber in a Slow-Burning True-Crime Study

'Peter and the Farm' director Tony Stone takes an ambient, minimalistic approach to the life of notorious domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski.

By Guy Lodge

Film Critic

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For a criminal who revealed his agenda in exhaustively detailed black-and-white — via his famous essay “Industrial Society and the Future,” published in The Washington Post months ahead of his 1996 capture — Ted Kaczynski remains a somewhat unreadable figure. The domestic terrorist better known as the Unabomber killed three people and injured two dozen more in a national bombing campaign aimed at protesting man’s environmental destruction and technological dependence. Yet his manifesto shed little light on who he actually was, or how a mild-mannered math professor from Chicago grew into an eccentric, isolated survivalist and, eventually, FBI most-wanted material. That makes him a subject both fascinating and oddly resistant to dramatization, though that hasn’t stopped writers and filmmakers from trying over the years.

The latest such effort, Tony Stone ‘s growlingly moody “ Ted K ,” is a biopic that effectively honors its subject with its opaque severity. There’s little attempt here to “crack” Kaczynski or psychologize him, even though the script is drawn heavily from his own extensive writings. A vivid, committed performance by Sharlto Copley does make the man of a million headlines seem appreciably human, but not approachably so. This is a distant, impressionistic character study that seeks to immerse its audience in a generally nervous state of mind — both that of Kaczynski himself, as his ambitions and exploits escalate to a point of anonymous celebrity, and of a public at his selective mercy. Quite what we gain from the experience is uncertain, with most viewers likely to leave the film understanding little more of the Unabomber than they did two hours before. Still, “Ted K” is impressive and oppressive in equal measure.

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A slow introductory crawl fills in the Wikipedia-level facts about Kaczynski for the uninformed, while also playing up the authenticity of the film to follow. It was shot, we are told, on the very patch of Montana land where Kaczynski’s spartan 10- by 12-foot cabin once stood, and incorporates firsthand perspective from the 25,000 pages of journaling found inside it. Stone hardly needs to brag. “Ted K” projects stony, disquieting conviction from its aggressive first set piece, which introduces Kaczynski spying on a wealthy family, his contempt tangible as they rowdily mess around on high-end snowmobiles outside their mountain lodge. Once they’ve left the premises, he breaks in, hacking through the walls with an ax before laying waste to the offending vehicles. An eerie electro-orchestral score by British experimental musician Blanck Mass (aka Benjamin John Power) is cranked to ear-stinging levels as the carnage continues.

This passage of home-invasion horror may be of little consequence compared to the crimes Kaczynski later commits, but it arrestingly captures his grievances in miniature. “Ted K” isn’t wholly unsympathetic to its subject’s cause, even if this opening salvo offers a frightening taste of the crazed excess with which he takes action. But the filmmaking gives weight to his pained concern for the environment, and his positively feverish sensitivity to noise pollution. The sound design is discordant, distorted, even anxiety-inducing. DP Nathan Corbin offers multiple serene tableaux of the verdant Montana landscape being wrecked by industry, as ruthlessly as Kaczynski hacks up those snowmobiles. Stone’s film doesn’t need to warm or soften its subject’s persona to underline the essential tragedy of the man: that he had something of a point, and the worst possible way of making it.

Rather than tracing a dutiful biographical arc, Stone’s script (co-written with Gaddy Davis and John Rosenthal) is composed of scattered vignettes from the last decade or so of Kaczynski’s life as a free man. Some are speculatively intimate, capturing his solitary daily routine in the woods, with no electricity and only a radio as a link to the modern world. Others procedurally mark the planning and execution of his bombings, though they maintain the cool temperature and austere observational tack of the more everyday scenes. The filmmakers can afford this unemotive reserve, since Copley’s strange, highly-strung work anchors proceedings with all the jittery intensity they need. In the South African star’s most interesting and expansive showcase since his debut in “District 9,” callused body language contrasts with the reedy, unconfident vocal tics of a man who rarely speaks to anyone but himself.

The backstory of Kaczynski’s evolution into a woody recluse is only glancingly filled in, often via anguished, one-sided phone conversations with his brother David, who is kept as inaudible as any direct line into the past. A scattering of fantasy scenes with the devoted woman of Kaczynski’s dreams are a miscalculation that feel imported from a more conventional, explicatory draft of this project. Likewise, we hardly need the blunt musical cue of Bobby Vinton’s “Mister Lonely” to tell us what a sad, sexless life we’re observing. At its best, “Ted K” reveals itself in sound, mood and texture, akin to the most prickly minimalism of Gus van Sant or Antonio Campos. It sidesteps any popular Unabomber mythos and remains reluctant to forge any of its own. Ted Kaczynski isn’t just a regular guy, that much Stone’s film makes clear. But he’s just a guy all the same.

Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (online), London, March 2, 2021. Running time: 121 MIN.

Production: A Heathen Films presentation, in association with Verisimilitude, Hideout Pictures, In Your Face Entertainment. (World sales: Hanway Films, London.) Producers: Tony Stone, Matt Flanders, Sharlto Copley. Executive producers: Cameron Brodie, Tyler Brodie, Melissa Auf der Maur, Shannon Houchins, Potsy Ponciroli, Trevor O’Neil. Co-producers: Jake Perlin, Niles Roth, Colin Scott.
Crew: Director: Tony Stone. Screenplay: Gaddy Davis, John Rosenthal, Stone. Camera: Nathan Corbin. Editors: Stone, Brad Turner. Music: Blanck Mass.
With: Sharlto Copley, Drew Powell, Amber Rose Mason, Travis Bruyer, Tahmus Rounds, Christian Calloway.

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‘Ted K’ Review: Sharlto Copley Turns Unabomber Ted Kaczynski Into ‘Joker’ with Eerie Biopic

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival. SuperLTD releases the film in theaters and on VOD on Friday, February 18.

Many movies endeavor to get inside the mind of a maniac, but “ Ted K ” goes straight to the source. Director Tony Stone’s chilling, immersive, and sometimes aimless portrait of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski draws on some 25,000 words of rambling diary entries from the lonely cabin-dweller, who raged against society from his secluded Montana cabin until his 1996 arrest. With a harrowing, disheveled Sharlto Copley at its center, the haunting, ambling narrative spends its entire unnerving runtime trapped inside Kaczynski’s head, where his disdain for technological progress and environmental destruction builds from small-scale sabotage to some of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.

Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski’s homemade bombs resulted in an assortment of horrible injuries and three deaths, with his targets ranging from an airline executive to a lobbyist. There’s no excuse for this behavior, and though the movie doesn’t try to make one, it gets close to his mindset. Like “Joker” without the exuberant blockbuster sheen, “Ted K” dares to come within striking distance of empathy for its maniacal subject, rooting his festering resentment in profound loneliness and alienation. It’s a rather unsophisticated view of a subject documented at great length over the last 25 years, but Copley — who also serves as producer — brings such a credible blend of white male fragility and violent frustration to the performance that he often transcends the restraints of the material, which doesn’t always cohere, but retains an eerie topicality after all these years.

Stone, who directed from a screenplay he co-wrote with Gaddy Davis and John Rosenthal, has clearly drawn on his experience with the documentary “Peter and the Farm” (in which an aging, socially maladroit Vermont farmer plots his suicide) to construct an absorbing visual tone poem more committed to the nuances of Kaczynski’s slow-burn insanity than any broader narrative framework. An opening crawl explains the gist of Kaczynski’s tragic story: a math genius who went to Harvard at 16, he eventually resorted to a proto-anarchistic view of society and retreated to rural Montana to live off the land. Rather than tracing Kaczynski’s tragic descent into madness, the movie lingers in its final, deadly form, not searching for answers so much as bearing witness to the terrible fact of its existence.

Which begs the question: What’s the point? That question hangs at the center of “Ted K” as an intriguing provocation, and begs daring viewers to look deep into Copley’s face for answers. The movie was shot on the same vacant, snowy landscape where Kaczynski lived, as a bearded Copley roams the wilderness, growing increasingly furious with the impact of deforestation and air pollution as jet planes and nearby industrial explosions ruin his tranquil surroundings. Adopting Kaczynski’s thick, nasally Philadelphia accent, Copley muses on the circumstances in constant voiceover as he wanders from furious typewriter sessions to casing the scenes of his crimes. “I act merely for my desire for revenge,” he proclaims, while raging against the “reckless ride into the unknown” that modern technology represents.

As much as Kaczynski’s ire speaks to a precise form of modern-day capitalist anger, he’s not the most sophisticated psychopath. No measure of literary asides can deepen the sense that his lunacy stems from a routine dissatisfaction with a society indifferent to his concerns. Given its minimalist approach, “Ted K” is often hamstrung by the limitations of its material. To compensate, the screenwriters shoehorn in a contrived imaginary romantic companion (Amber Rose Mason) — again, the “Joker” comparisons are unmistakable — along with extensive sequences that find Kaczynski engaged in prolonged, snarling one-sided phone calls with his estranged brother (who eventually tipped off the FBI). These scenes are about as instructive as Kaczynski’s Wikipedia page.

The movie works on steadier ground as a pure mood piece, with cinematographer Nathan Corbin’s stunning outdoor scenery and a thundering electronic score by Benjamin John Power (aka Blanck Mass) contributing to a grand, solitary epic, the kind of high-stakes drama Kaczynski undoubtedly imagined himself in. Though some of its bigger music cues feel a touch on-the-nose (in particular, “Mr. Lonely,” with the lyrics to Alice In Chains’ “Rooster” practically explaining Kaczynski’s internal monologue), it’s easy to imagine that the man would have seen himself in somewhat heavy-handed terms as he taunted the FBI and mainstream media through anonymous letters explaining his deeds.

Stone follows Kaczynski through a series of bombings, using the restraints of a visibly low-budget production in its favor by staying close to its subject’s face and interspersing the occasional news reports. Mostly, though, his rickety wooden cabin provides a centerpiece for the drama as Kaczynski begins to view himself as both prophet of doom and, well, a doomed prophet. An entrancing nightmare scene finds the gravity of his small home inverting around him as he escapes out the window, the entire logic of his plans threatening to collapse on top of him.

And of course, it does that, though Kaczynski’s eventual arrest and imprisonment arrives as an afterthought. As with “Joker,” the movie commits to staying within the mania of its anti-hero until the very end, even mustering a willingness to dig into the darkness and find some measure of somber beauty in the visions of peace he occasionally finds in the forest. Tonally, “Ted K” bears a strong resemblance to the elegant Americana in Tim Sutton’s work (“Dark Night,” “Memphis”), which pairs documentary naturalism with the poetry of lost souls in its midst.

Here, that’s the essence of Kaczynski, a character struggling to find his place in a vast universe indifferent to his problems. It’s a fascinating gamble for Copley, an actor who often seems eager to push beyond the boundaries of more conventional mainstream projects with visceral intensity. He finds a different sort out of outlet in “Ted K,” though there’s just enough complexity to his screen presence to suggest he could’ve gone even further with a bigger canvas. As it stands, “Ted K” amounts to a fragmented set of moments, many of them quite disturbing, and some them quite sad. But the half-baked quality of the big picture leads to the conclusion that it may be impossible to ever fully comprehend the motivating factors that led to Kaczynski’s fate — and perhaps that’s how it belongs.

“Ted K” premiered at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival.

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Ted K visits the Unabomber’s neck of the woods

Sharlto Copley embodies Ted Kaczynski in Tony Stone’s tragicomic dramatisation of the deluded ramblings of a domestic terrorist.

11 March 2021

By John Bleasdale

Reviewed at the 2021 Berlinale.

Before the word ‘incel’ was coined and the danger of domestic terrorism fully realised, Ted Kaczynski was sitting in his cabin in the woods writing reams of eco-fascist musings and building bombs. The maths genius turned murderer better known as the Unabomber is the subject of Tony Stone’s new film, an intimate portrait of a man whose frustrations turn to murderous violence.

We first spy Ted in the distance through the trees, while in the foreground snowmobiles tear through the landscape. The noise of the snowmobiles and the heavy doom-filled drone of the Blanck Mass score portends something bad brewing. Sure enough, Ted breaks into the home of the offending snowmobilers and vandalises the vehicles.

It is the late 1970s and Ted (played with wild-eyed commitment by Sharlto Copley) has retreated to the woods in the mountains of Montana. Even here his Waldenesque rural retreat is constantly intruded on by a noisy modernity. Snowmobiles in the winter, cross-country motorcyclists in the summer and logging operations all year round contribute to a cacophony which, thanks to Tim Obzud’s sound design, seems to drill into Ted’s head, rendering impossible his escape from modern industrial society.

The way Ted is beset almost becomes comic. Ted’s cabin has to be the noisiest hermitage ever, but the suggestion – similar to that of Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007) – is that there is no way of escaping. Only a vanishingly small wilderness remains.

Ted is soon testing his homemade explosives and heading across the country on “missions”, all the while explaining his grievances in a voiceover gleaned by scriptwriters Stone, Gaddy Davis and John Rosenthal from the thousands of pages Kaczynski wrote.

Initially, Ted cuts a pathetic figure, riding a chopper bicycle to town and wearing chunky sunglasses. But his misanthropy and more particular misogyny come easily to the surface. “I don’t take instruction on technical matters from women,” he tells one at the logging camp where he briefly works, earning a prompt firing from the woman who happens to run the place. Although targeting ideological enemies, Ted admits the bombs are more about spite than societal change.

Despite Ted’s relatively flat character arc, Copley does a superb job of realising the tragicomic figure of a man convinced of his own delusions. That hoary old cliche about the banality of evil has never been so apt as Ted goes from gleefully plotting to murder people to having a drawn-out argument with the phone company – the offices of which he visits in person – about how the payphone eats through his quarters. When asked how much money he has lost, the sum is predictably pitiful.

In fact, Copley’s performance is so strong, it renders Stone’s occasional attempts to depict Ted’s madness with a cinematic flourish – a nightmare sequence of the cabin turning upside down – as redundant. This is especially true of a Joker-like imaginary girlfriend: a never-convincing trope which surely needs to be retired. Ultimately, Ted K works in the vein of John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1989) – a film which, along with The Shining , it visually quotes – and, with the rise of far-right terrorism in the US , is regrettably all too relevant today.

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‘Ted K’ Film Review: Impressionistic Unabomber Drama Reveals the Man Beneath the Monster

Director Tony Stone and actor Sharlto Copley take us on a breathless high-wire act, suspended over one man’s madness

A risky experiment with a striking payoff, “Ted K” is an impressionistic attempt to personalize the most unrelatable experience imaginable: life as a killer.

Prolific serial killers are often introduced with media-minded nicknames, making it easier for us simultaneously to separate from them and to connect with them. We look upon them as Other, but remain interested, reading and worrying and wondering until — and well after — they’re caught.

The Unabomber is among the most notable examples, with 26 victims spanning nearly two decades. His incomprehensible violence spurred the largest manhunt in FBI history, and as it went on, we all kept reading, and worrying, and wondering.

Director Tony Stone (“Peter and the Farm”) and his co-writers, John Rosenthal and Gaddy Davis, strip away most of the rest in an attempt to address the incomprehensibility. Certainly, the film’s generically ordinary title is no coincidence. Stone wants us to see Ted — whose full name is Theodore John Kaczynski — as a person, rather than a notorious monster. This is a hazardous choice, of course, not least because it risks privileging a terrorist over the people he terrorized. But Stone is not merely aware that he’s walking a fine line; he turns it into a tightrope, going all in and pulling off a haunting spectacle as a result.

He is matched in his bravado by lead Sharlto Copley (“District 9”), who burrows with intensity, and occasional over-amplification, into Ted’s agitated brain. Though it’s not a pretty place to be, it is certainly a more complex one than any nickname could allow.

Stone isn’t remotely interested in a traditional biopic, almost impatiently dispensing with most of the facts in an opening crawl: Ted went to Harvard at 16, became a mathematics professor at UC Berkeley, dropped out of civilization soon after, and disappeared into the far recesses of the Rocky Mountains.

Instead of retelling us what we can easily find on Wikipedia, Stone relies on the 25,000 pages of frenzied writing found in Kaczynski’s tiny cabin, using those notebooks to inspire everything from plot to dialogue to inner monologue. Most of the film features the latter, since Ted is not a guy who appreciates other people in general.

There are a few significant exchanges with neighbors, fellow volunteers at his local library and his brother David. There’s also an idealized and rather awkwardly portrayed relationship with a female figment of his increasingly manic imagination (Amber Rose Mason). But his primary interactions are shouting matches sparked by the arrogant trespassers who carelessly roar through his pristine Montana land on ATVs or snowmobiles.

That land, like the movie in general, is absolutely gorgeous, as director of photography Nathan Corbin approaches his job with unexpected but powerful artistry. Stone and Brad Turner (“Patti Cake$”) co-edit the film to similarly startling, sharply purposeful, effect: After gasping at the stunning wildlife roaming freely around the breathtaking vista where Ted has chosen to live in monastic awe, can we blame him for hating all who would destroy it? For being pushed to alienated fury over their ceaseless selfishness and willful destruction of our mutual planet?

Well, yeah. We can, and we have to, because Ted destroys, too: First he cuts snowmobile wires and then he builds bombs. And then those bombs maim people, and then they kill people. Sometimes they hurt the intended recipients, like executives in timber or oil industries. Sometimes they hurt others, like the secretaries and assistants who happen to open the mail. And even as Stone brings us right to the edge of Ted’s mind — as he documents the brilliant passion curdling into narcissistic madness — he knows that we can’t fall into the ravine with him.

The Psychopathic Psyche Probe has become an increasingly popular genre, for better (“My Friend Dahmer”) and worse (“Chapter 27”). Stone is so committed, so aware of every trap and every opportunity, that his is among the most memorable entries. He seems attuned to the nuances of every detail, from the carefully-researched recreation of Ted’s cabin in the very spot it once stood, to the fevered mental fantasies that unfold against lacelike classical symphonies and Blanck Mass’s unsettling electronica.

In the end Stone achieves his goal: locating Ted inside the Unabomber. He reserves his own judgement, while managing to skirt the suggestion that we do the same. The actions remain as clearly monstrous as they always were. But the monster himself, still trapped in the same zealous mind, is a man once more.

“Ted K” opens in U.S. theaters and on demand Feb. 18.

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‘ted k’: film review | berlin 2021.

Sharlto Copley plays the Rocky Mountains wilderness recluse who became known to the world as the Unabomber in Tony Stone's unsettlingly intimate true crime thriller, 'Ted K.'

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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The underseen but arresting 2016 documentary feature Peter and the Farm is a warts-and-all portrait of a flinty Vermont loner and his volatile relationship to the land that has consumed him for more than three decades. Its director, Tony Stone, now blurs the line between nonfiction and narrative filmmaking to depict another solitary man inseparable from his natural environment in Ted K , a piercing psychological probe into the domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber. Played by Sharlto Copley in a febrile performance so wired it’s almost uncomfortable to watch, Ted Kaczynski is revealed here in his own words, lifted from 25,000 pages of writing that predates his arrest in 1996.

A Star Wars -length opening info crawl fills in the background on the subject, a brilliant student who skipped grades to attend Harvard at 16, earning a PhD in mathematics and abandoning a professorship after a year to turn his back on society. With his brother David, he built a 10 x 12-foot cabin on a small parcel of land in the Rocky Mountains near Lincoln, Montana, and lived there alone without running water or electricity for 25 years.

The Bottom Line Mesmerizing.

Stone made his film on the same land where the cabin once stood, and the icy intensity of his approach is evident from the opening titles sequence. Over footage of a family of five on snowmobiles, zipping among the trees of a forest drenched in winter sun, the thunderous operatic electronica of Scottish producer Benjamin John Power, who records as Blanck Mass, plants a sinister seed of dread. The music’s portentous drone tones echo everything from vintage John Carpenter to Dario Argento prog-rock favorites, Goblin — far from subtle but chillingly effective.

By the time the distant figure of Copley’s Ted is glimpsed stepping out from behind a tree, the brooding note of sustained horror that defines the film has been struck. It’s then reinforced in the scene that follows, as Ted smashes through a wall of the luxury lodge where the family is staying and proceeds to lay waste to the interior with an ax while the wall-mounted head of a stag looks on stoically from above. Ted then heads out to the garage to wreck the offending snowmobiles. The whole wordless opening act is certainly an attention-getter.

“Modern technology is the worst thing to ever happen to the world, and to promote its progress is nothing short of criminal,” says Copley in voiceover used with sparing precision throughout. As Ted hunts or fishes for his food and harvests vegetables from his garden plot, he alternates between finding peace among nature and bristling with rage at the intrusion of low-flying jets, industry and motorcycle thrill-riders. He records these daily violations, as well as his acts of sabotage, in notebooks penned in painstaking numerical code and translated in subtitles.

“Here the noise destroys something wonderful, whereas in the city, there is nothing to destroy because one is living in a shit pile anyway,” he says. If you were around before the internet age, chances are you will have wondered one time or another if so much technology and limitless information in the hands of so many is a good thing. Portrayed here from inside his head, Kaczynski is a walking illustration of that concern inflated into dangerous paranoia, exploring the fine line between genius and madness.

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Ted K review – queasy inner life of the monkish, unhappy Unabomber

Sharlto Copley excels behind a straggly beard in this portrait of the serial terror-bomber, on a mission against modern technology

T ony Stone’s Ted K is an eerily plausible and unsettlingly mesmeric realisation of the inner world of Ted Kaczynski: that is, the private life of the “Unabomber” , America’s most notorious domestic terrorist who, working largely from his primitive cabin in the Montana wilderness, killed three people and injured 22 more in a mail-bombing campaign lasting from 1978 to 1995, ostensibly in pursuit of an eco-fundamentalist crusade against all modern technology. Staggeringly, his campaign induced the Washington Post in 1995 to publish his rambling manifesto in return for a promised cessation of bombing. Something which had seemed like a catastrophic capitulation to terror turned out to be a smart move against it, when Kaczynski’s estranged brother recognised his writing and alerted the authorities. As ever with true-crime movies like this, good or bad, there is a strange, transgressive and slightly nauseous undertow to the viewing experience, knowing that the real protagonist is still alive, behind bars, the shadowy original author of everything on screen, but certainly not invited to participate in any promotional Zoom Q&A — though perhaps one day permitted to see the film himself. The South African actor Sharlto Copley plays Ted: a fierce, gaunt, angry man, whose sharp and rather distinguished features are mostly blurred by a straggly beard. He is a former brilliant mathematician and college professor who turned away from academe in favour of a radical hermit existence. Stone films a queasily black-comic scene in which Ted makes a furious phone call to his mother from one of the pre-internet, pre-smartphone telephone booths of the era, ranting that she had ruined his emotional and sexual life by pushing him academically too early, and that he has still never got beyond first base with a woman — “rubbing tongues”. “Well, who else am I supposed to tell this to?” he screams at her. (One answer might be his estranged brother David, but the topic of conversation there is not sex but money, and how David should lend him some.) Otherwise, we see Ted making a few dollars here and there with menial jobs, including at one of the hated logging companies, where he gets fired for making sneerily sexist comments to the female manager. He also one stage, bizarrely, has a job tutoring a local teenage kid in mathematics, and appears conscientious and good at it. But Copley and Stone show how Kaczynski is driven by hate and revenge. He spends some of his time in creepy serial-killer home-invader mode, breaking into the luxury cabin of vacationers who wreck the environment with their noisy snowmobiles, on a mission to destroy these devilish means of transport with his axe. But Kaczynski has no desire for face-to-face violence. He just has a monkish vocation for building bombs (as a scientist, he would have had the brainpower for the job, and if he used that notorious instruction manual, The Anarchist’s Cookbook, it isn’t mentioned here.) The movie spends long stretches of time alongside Kaczynsski he roams the forests of his mind, or haunts the desolate roadways and back-alleys, smugly awaiting a detonation. He smiles really just once: on hearing of the Washington Post’s capitulation to his demands. Kaczynski affects an interest in Joseph Conrad (presumably the novel The Secret Agent ) and uses Conrad as an alias sometimes. But in literary terms, he is closer to the vengeful Christie Malry in BS Johnson’s novel — or perhaps the lonely, driven Lee Harvey Oswald in Don DeLillo’s Libra. We see how Kaczynski has become part of the nation’s popular culture: on magazine covers and news programmes in the form of the police-artist sketch of a figure in sunglasses and hoodie — for a delirious moment he is of equal status as OJ Simpson being chased in his white Ford Bronco, a weird harbinger of celebrity culture. It is a riveting, dreamlike evocation of this man’s tortured, unhappy life, whose transient successes bring him no pleasure of any kind.

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Unabomber biopic 'Ted K' is a disturbing, horrific look inside the mind of the infamous terrorist

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Filmmaker Tony Stone gives us a disturbing look inside the mind of loner, terrorist Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, played by Sharlto Copley (released Feb. 18), in Ted K.

“This film was made on the land where his cabin once stood and uses his words from the 25,000 pages of writing that filled his shelves to tell this story,” text at the beginning of the movie reads.

The search for the Unabomber was the largest manhunt in FBI history after 17 years of bombings, killing three people and injuring 23 others. Kaczynski described his actions as “a revolution against the industrial system.”

His first mail bomb was addressed to an engineering professor at Northwestern University in Illinois, which detonated and injured a security officer.

Early on in the film, we see Kaczynski’s rage with the evolution of modern technology, as he lives in his cabin in the woods in Lincoln, Montana.

“Modern technology is the worst thing that ever happened to the world,” you hear as an early voiceover in the story. “To promote its progress is nothing short of criminal.”

There’s a serenity to the way Stone crafts what we see of the Montana landscape, with the erratic aggression of Kaczynski, and sounds of opera and classical music, that leans into the bizarre and disturbing.

“Here the noise destroys something wonderful while in the city, there’s nothing for noises to destroy because one is living in a shit pile anyway,” Kaczynski says in the film.

Ultimately, Kaczynski's concerns about destruction of nature and the rise of technology shows the line between someone who could be seen as a genius, who went to Harvard at the age of 16 for mathematics, and someone with extreme paranoia that ends in horror.

It’s that rage of heightened emotion that you see bubbling up inside of Copley’s portrayal of Kaczynski that brings the monster to life. This is particularly true as Kaczynski is constantly going to a local payphone to call his mother and brother to beg for money, and he specifically rants about his lack of sexual experiences with women.

The Ted K story through a series of vignettes can seem quite disjointed at times but ultimately, this isn’t a circumstance where we’re going to understand Kaczynski’s motivations.

In 1995, Kaczynski contacted U.S. newspapers with his manifesto, which was published in The Washington Post. When it was published, Kaczynski’s brother and sister-in-law were able to recognize his writing and informed the FBI. He was arrested in 1996 and is serving a life sentence in prison.

Ted K Review: A Disturbing Portrayal of the Infamous Unabomber

Theodore Kacyznksi (Sharlto Copley) lives in remote Montana while targeting victims with mail bombs.

Ted K is an intimate portrayal of a dangerous recluse who would eventually become the FBI’s longest terrorist investigation. Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the infamous Unabomber, maimed and killed through sophisticated mail bombs over a twenty-five-year period. Sharlto Copley plays Kaczynski from 1971 to his capture in the late nineties. The film was partially shot on Kaczynski’s Montana land and uses dialogue taken from his prolific writings. It paints an ugly picture of an educated, but angry and misogynistic loner who relished murder.

Ted K begins in remote Lincoln, Montana. Theodore Kaczynski (Copley) rages at the snowmobiles that spoil his pristine wilderness with their grating noise. He vehemently despises modern technology. Vandalizing nearby cabins of wealthy neighbors and the equipment of logging companies. He bitterly narrates his grievances against the world. Typing coded journals in his tiny shack, he curses humanity over radio news feeds. Kaczynski calls his brother and mother from telephone booths. Begging for money while criticizing their lives as pawns in a rotten system.

We watch as Kaczynski hones his explosive craft . He takes odd jobs to buy seemingly innocuous electronic equipment for his bombs. He also steals when the opportunity arises. Kaczynski, a Harvard mathematician, goes to great lengths to conceal his identity and thwart authorities. He revels in the attention his bombing spree has achieved. Ted K wants his poisonous ideology spread far and wide. He taunts the FBI but has a different request for the major news outlets following his trail of violence.

South African actor Sharlto Copley teeters on a razor’s edge of fury. Kaczynski is consumed by perceived slights and wrongs. His only respite is nature’s solitude. But that’s constantly interrupted by the machinery of men. The film also takes a deliberate look at his sexual repression. Kaczynski hated women and treated them with little respect. A telling scene has him railing against his lack of sexual contact. He channeled his negative energy into perfecting more lethal devices.

Cinematographer turned director Tony Stone (Peter and the Farm) uses aggressive tactics to show Kaczynski’s unstable behavior. Ted K is not Henry David Thoreau calmly exploring and documenting nature. Kaczynski’s primitive survivalist lifestyle has an accompaniment of disturbing sounds. There’s a cacophony of discordant classical music , opera, and machines buzzing. The screen turns blood-red as Kaczynski plots the details for his next targets. Stone also visualizes Kaczynski’s bizarre nightmares as described in his diaries.

Ted K’s reliance on voice-over narration treads monotonous as the film progresses. The script uses Kaczynki’s own words to frame his state of mind. His homicidal intent and calculating personality are clearly established in the first act. Another method was needed to express his thoughts; rather than always explaining to the audience. The voice-over dialogue feels less severe the more brazen he gets. Ted K works best when we see him coldly interacting with the environment and himself. Kacynzski was a psychopath who feigned normalcy to scout his targets.

Sharlto Copley is front and center in almost every frame. He nails the disturbing traits of a remorseless individual. I was concerned that Ted K would give a merciless killer some modicum of empathy. It gives no credence to the Unabomber. Ted K is a production of Heathen Films. It will have a concurrent VOD and limited theatrical release on February 18th from Neon.

The Cinema Cult

‘ted k’ review: a diary of a pathetic terrorist.

While some creators avoid stories from the perspective of evil individuals, others thrive in a space that may cause discomfort. These people understand the value that comes with darker tales as it allows them the opportunity to dissect personalities that are very present within society. Co-written and directed by Tony Stone, Ted K invites us into the world of real-life terrorist Ted Kaczynski AKA the Unabomber. Conveyed via a powerful performance from Sharlto Copley, this diary of a pathetic terrorist is rather compelling even if it frequently feels uneven and hollow.

Living a secluded life in the mountains, a man begins to plan deadly attacks as an act of revenge on technology and modern society. There are a few supporting appearances here and there but the film rests squarely on the shoulders of Sharlto Copley, the actor behind the titular person.

Ted K is a movie that confidently portrays events in a way that feels entirely honest. It is never afraid to show Kaczynski in a feeble light as he very likely was a pitiful man in many respects. Sadly, an issue that arises from this approach is that the serious nature of the Unabomber’s attacks isn’t felt as much as it should. The film admits that this was the biggest man-hunt in the history of the FBI but we never really see this nor do we dissect the darker side of Kaczynski’s psychology.

Furthermore, since we join him when he is already creating his weapons, we don’t really learn why he has gone down this deadly path. We hear his explanation to the public but these words never truly feel factual. One could argue that these points are to the film’s advantage as it signals that everything is from Kaczynski’s perspective but that doesn’t offer solace in the fact that the script has almost no plot. However, where this POV does hold merit is in the depiction of the surrounding world. The environments and the machines in them feel almost fantastical as if this were a forest filled with roaming mechanical beasts. This is thanks to the mesmerising cinematography and score from Nathan Corbin and Blanck Mass, respectively.

Beyond the technical attributes, the reason that the film is quite engaging is because of Sharlto Copley’s fantastic performance. He improves the quality of every scene as he truly embodies the Unabomber’s personality. While the movie is a little long at 122-minutes, it never gets boring as our lead always delivers entertaining actions in a way that will make audiences eager to see more.

Ted K is a film that is undoubtedly flawed but its lead actor elevates it to a level that makes it worth watching if you are a fan of true crime. Sharlto Copley has once again proved that he is one of the most underrated actors working today.

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Compelling deep dive into the mind of the Unabomber.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Asks viewers to look at Ted's life without judgmen

Ted is virtually the only real character in the mo

The movie's entire focus is Ted, a White male (all

Guns and shooting. Skinning a rabbit. Bomb-making.

Naked male bottom and chest. Topless woman shown b

Uses of "f--k," "s--t," "c---sucker," "c--k," "a--

Background drinking and smoking by secondary chara

Positive Messages

Asks viewers to look at Ted's life without judgment and realize that behind his poor decisions were genuine pain and human emotions.

Positive Role Models

Ted is virtually the only real character in the movie, and he's definitely not a role model.

Diverse Representations

The movie's entire focus is Ted, a White male (all other characters are in the background). From his point of view, women are subordinate and not equal to men. ("I don't take direction from women," he says, asking for the woman's husband instead.)

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Guns and shooting. Skinning a rabbit. Bomb-making. Explosions. Character hits self with cinder block. Vandalism. Tearing hole in wall with axe. Smashing things. Setting snowmobiles on fire. Setting tractor on fire. Chopping down telephone pole. Car slowly crashes into tree. Person roughly grabbed.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Naked male bottom and chest. Topless woman shown briefly. Implied masturbation (under a blanket). Brief images of women while flipping through Penthouse magazine. Sex-related dialogue ("first base," "touching of breasts," etc.).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Uses of "f--k," "s--t," "c---sucker," "c--k," "a--hole," "t-ts," "goddamn," "idiot," "nuts," "orgasm." Middle-finger gesture.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Background drinking and smoking by secondary characters.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Ted K is a biopic about Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber (played here by Sharlto Copley ). It gets inside Kaczynski's chaotic head while still maintaining some semblance of order; it works mainly due to Copley's performance. Violence includes guns and shooting, bomb-making, explosions, vandalism, setting things on fire, smashing things, skinning a rabbit, etc. A man's bare bottom is seen, there's a brief glimpse of a topless woman and a quick view of images in a Penthouse magazine, and it's implied that a man is masturbating under a blanket. There's also sex-related dialogue, plus swearing ("f--k," "s--t," "c---sucker," "a--hole," and more). Background characters are occasionally seen drinking and smoking. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

In TED K, Ted Kaczynski ( Sharlto Copley ) is living in a small 10-foot x 12-foot cabin in the woods of Montana. Agitated by the noise of passing planes and snowmobiles, he becomes more and more convinced that machines are taking over the world. He commits small acts of violence, such as breaking into a home and destroying a family's snowmobiles. This escalates into making bombs. And as time goes on, he becomes more obsessed with making big changes. He writes a 35,000-word manifesto and hatches a plan to get it published in the big daily papers. But by that time, the FBI has launched the world's largest manhunt to find him.

Is It Any Good?

This deep dive into the mind of a notorious terrorist is handled well, forgoing all the tired, traditional biopic notes and staying focused on the subject and capturing his emotions. Directed by Tony Stone, Ted K doesn't glorify Kaczynski, but nor does it tame him. It also doesn't try to be heavy or brutal, like a horror film. As it moves along, we begin to understand Kaczynski's choices, even if we disagree with them. For example, it makes sense that he would be irritated by all the buzzing snowmobiles (and mopeds in the summer), and it makes sense that he might be angry about it. The movie pieces together a kind of psychological profile of him as it proceeds.

Stone attempts a slightly soft, dreamy feel in the movie's fabric, as if Kaczynski weren't quite living in a hard, cold reality. Ted even imagines a girlfriend for himself, Becky (Amber Rose Mason), who only tells him how wonderful he is. (He has no idea how to communicate with real women.) Copley is a large reason the movie works. The actor has always had a quality of cheerful insanity (he was perfect for "Howling Mad" Murdock in The A-Team ), and he plays Kaczynski not only with ease, but with a certain kind of muted glee. Ted K introduces us not to an evil man, but to a real person who was deeply troubled, went too far, and deservedly paid a price for his crimes.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Ted K 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

Is it possible to see Kaczynski as a flawed human in this movie, rather than a monster? How does the movie tell his story without judgment?

Why are we so fascinated with real-life killers?

Do you agree with any of Kaczynski's opinions about machines/computers ? What would be some healthier, less destructive ways of addressing this?

Movie Details

In theaters : February 18, 2022
On DVD or streaming : May 24, 2022
Cast : Sharlto Copley , Drew Powell , Amber Rose Mason
Director : Tony Stone
Studio : Neon
Genre : Drama
Run time : 123 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language, some sexual content and brief nudity
Last updated : October 8, 2022

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ted K’ on Hulu, an Unconventional Biopic in Which Sharlto Copley Chillingly Embodies the Unabomber

Where to Stream:

Sharlto Copley

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Now on Hulu, Ted K casts Sharlto Copley as Ted “The Unabomber” Kaczynski, which is kind of a stroke of deranged genius. Copley is known for playing screw-loose types in stuff like The A-Team , District 9 and, uh, Chappie , so tackling the Unabomber seems to be in his wheelhouse, but also an opportunity to stretch himself creatively (it’s by far his most “serious” role). Filmmaker Tony Stone keeps his focus on Copley’s fully committed portrayal of the notorious Montana man who killed three and injured many more with letter bombs between 1978 and 1995, and doesn’t seem interested in making a typical biopic.

TED K : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Ominous scrolling text reveals that the film was shot on the very land where Kaczynski lived, and the story is culled from his own words (presumably from the 40,000 pages of journals found among his belongings). Next, snowmobilers. They tear through the Montana woods. Noisily. Ted (Copley) hates it. He spies on them as they zoom and roar and pollute. We next see Ted taking an ax to the wall of a luxury cabin. He randomly smashes things as he walks through the home, finds the garage housing the snowmobiles, and axes the hell out of them. Ted’s been living in the mountains without running water or electricity for years, killing rabbits for dinner, listening to classical music on the radio, obsessively journaling, cursing at airplanes passing loudly overhead and occasionally firing bullets at helicopters, fruitlessly. All he wants is peace and quiet.

Ted is a math whiz (with a Ph.D) who became an ecology extremist, Luddite and consummate loner. He’s funny when he’s a disgruntled type-a-letter-to-the-editor guy, less so when he decides he wants to kill people he perceives as ruining the beauty of the natural environment, ranting from airline CEOs to computer salesmen. He calls his mother on the payphone to beg for money and verbally spar with her, and he deviates into psychochatter about how he’s never had sex with a woman, which is something she doesn’t want to hear about. Perhaps Ted is the blueprint for the modern incel, a pre-internet doomed virgin who inspired countless Twitter trolls? I speculate.

What makes Ted’s moral compass go wonky? Hard to tell. Being his own company for so long, perhaps. Sometimes he bicycles into town to visit the library, or mop up the diner or work at the local lumber mill for a payday. Some people know him as the weirdo way out there in the cabin, nice enough, polite, quiet, mostly keeps to himself. He’s quite the misogynist if you get too close, however. News of the Exxon oil spill enrages him. Utility workers erecting power lines and poles enrages him. A woman running the show at the mill enrages him. So he starts building bombs, experimenting with them until they progress from flimsy firecrackers to lethal weapons. He ventures into San Francisco, shaves his beard, cuts his hair, seals the bombs in packages and drops them in mailboxes. He writes his manifesto, and we hear portions of it in voiceover as he stokes a fire to heat water for a makeshift shower. The industrial revolution ruined humanity, he says, as warm water rushes out of a bucket with holes in it, and we watch him wash his ass.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Ted K is Into the Wild crossed with Taxi Driver crossed with Joker crossed with Capone .

Performance Worth Watching: Copley’s performance is pretty much it for the whole two hours, so be thankful it’s very much worth watching.

Memorable Dialogue: After jet planes fly overhead and startle him with a sonic boom, we hear Ted’s voice via his journal: “It reduced me to tears of impotent rage. But I have a plan for revenge.”

Sex and Skin: Ted has never had sex. But Ted does wash his ass.

Our Take: Ted K is equal parts chilling and obscure. Chilling, because we spend so much time with and get so close to someone whose core values stand in stark contrast to his disregard for the value of human life; we’re drawn into his sphere by his admirable concern for preserving the environment, but there are obvious sympathetic lines we can’t cross, and that’s a cold, cold feeling. And obscure, because we get no scenes of Ted as a child or student or anything within most of our familiar societal settings; we’re dropped into his isolated existence and there we stay until he slowly, excruciatingly ventures into madness, not of the foaming-and-frenzied variety, but a silent blazing flame of hatred deep within him.

Notably, Stone only diverts from Ted’s point of view to show us his bombs exploding and shredding buildings and people, although not in too much gory detail. Otherwise, we hang with Copley and his highly distinctive misery, which Copley wordlessly curdles into derangement. It’s a fascinatingly committed, convincing performance, even when it ventures into cryptic territory we’ll never understand. Stone is not at all concerned about the timeline here; the narrative makes jagged leaps forward with the occasional cue (e.g., a news report of the 1989 Exxon disaster), but the goal appears to be disorientation, to make us better understand the guy’s substantial societal disconnect.

We are privy to bizarre inner monologues and hallucinations, with recurring appearances of a fantasy woman Ted never has and never will be able to touch; a surreal waking-dream sequence at the dead-midpoint of the film has Ted scrambling from his bed as the cabin tumbles over, forcing him out the window, while Bobby Vinton’s ‘Mr. Lonely’ plays, somehow with both on-the-nose sincerity and winking irony, on the soundtrack. Such odd creative flourishes, and a tone veering from doom-ridden to darkly comic, differentiate Ted K from most biopics.

Will you stream or skip the unconventional Ted "The Unabomber" Kaczynski biopic #TedK on @hulu ? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) June 22, 2022

Our Call: STREAM IT. Ted K is by no means an easy or enjoyable watch. But oddly compelling, hypnotic and provocative? For sure. It’s definitely not for everyone, though.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com .

Stream Ted K on Hulu

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Home » ‘Ted K’ review: Sharlto Copley enters the mind of the Unabomber to mixed results

‘Ted K’ review: Sharlto Copley enters the mind of the Unabomber to mixed results

In Ted K , Sharlto Copley and Tony Stone don’t quite justify yet another film tackling the complex and horrifying life of the Unabomber.

Despite the roughly 25,000 pages of diary entries and The Washington Post manifesto “Industrial Society and the Future,” Ted Kaczynski (A.K.A the Unabomber) remains a largely indecipherable figure. Two recent Netflix shows—the drama series Manhunt: Unabomber and docuseries Unabomber: In His Own Words —have attempted to shed light on the domestic terrorist’s life.

What caused Kaczynski, a former mathematics professor, to kill 3 people, injure 23 more, and become the subject of the largest manhunt in FBI history? Ted K , a new, unsettling historical crime drama directed and co-written by Tony Stone ( Peter and the Farm ), avoids answering this question and instead observes the societal frustrations that inspired the Unabomber’s murderous acts.

From 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski targeted individuals he deemed contributors to the destruction of humanity and the environment, including anyone from a computer store owner to the president of United Airlines. The film does not glorify his behavior, but it does allow some room for empathy, to the extent one can have for such a horrible person, through its depiction of his life of isolation and loneliness. Sharlto Copley delivers a restrained performance that presents Kaczynski as a man who is quick to anger and feels alienated from the rest of the world. He is enraged by a society that ignores his deepest fears and retreats into a 10- by 12-foot cabin in the woods of Lincoln, Montana.

We first see Ted in the distance watching through the trees with contempt as a family noisily drives their snowmobiles, disrupting the peace in his beloved woods. We then witness his rage when he breaks into the family’s home and destroys their vehicles, foreshadowing what would later become his bombing “missions.” The film places the audience straight into Kaczynski’s agitated state of mind, with Copley providing voiceover as industrial explosions, deforestation, and pollution threaten his home.

The audience understands his bombings as acts of revenge against this industrial advancement and his admission that societal change to a more primitive lifestyle is improbable. The sound design, along with the anxiety-inducing electronic score by Blanck Mass, deserve credit here as the cacophony of Kaczynski’s surroundings drives him mad and makes his attempts to escape modern society futile. In addition, the cinematography by Nathan Corbin expresses Kaczynski’s frustrations by contrasting the serene Montana landscape with the violent destruction of industrial enterprise.

Stone pushes past many conventional biopic tropes in favor of forming a series of vignettes from the last years of Kaczynski’s life before his arrest. The vignettes range from depicting the preparation and execution of the bombings to Kaczynski’s daily routine living in his cabin. Spliced in between are his regular interactions with the outside world, taking on various jobs and conversing with his mother and brother, whom he eventually cuts off contact with. In these moments, we see Kaczynski’s misanthropy and dysfunctional social habits take real shape. And through his toxic interactions with women, Kaczynski’s misogyny and sexual frustration come to the surface. “I don’t take instruction on technical matters from women,” he says before getting fired from a logging job.

These moments are also where the film unfortunately missteps. Stone’s loose narrative framework and focus on stylistic flourishes, including bizarre dream sequences and abrupt jump cuts, obfuscate the writing of Kaczynski’s character. In this way, Ted K acts more as a ponderous mood piece inundated in the slow burn of Kaczynski’s descent, rather than a film with evocative visuals that complement Copley’s lead performance.

This willingness for experimentation is respectable, but too often it leads to a repetitive narrative that lacks any forward momentum toward Kaczynski’s eventual downfall. The fantasy sequences with Becky, a woman from Kaczynski’s dreams, feel tacked on while the one-sided phone conversations with Kaczynski’s brother David are underdeveloped. This lack of cohesion results in a tedious two-hour affair with an ending that doesn’t give us much to contemplate afterward.

As the centerpiece of Ted K , Sharlto Copley’s performance shines through the muck. Projects such as District 9 and Hardcore Henry have long proven that Copley embraces risks as a transformative actor. Here, he balances Kaczynski’s rage over civilization with the peace he finds within nature. But his performance is held back by an overall mixed film. The audience is left with little to work with on what drives Kaczynski, preventing him from being a completely engaging presence. Perhaps that’s what Stone is aiming for. An enigmatic man struggling to find belonging in a world unsympathetic to his problems.

Ted K will be available in theaters and on digital on February 18. Watch the trailer here .

Alex Nguyen

Alex Nguyen is an aspiring entertainment writer as well as a film and music enthusiast based in Seattle, WA. He enjoys going to indie concerts and dissecting all kinds of films.

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