Strange Harvest Review

True crime has been around for hundreds of years, arising not long after the invention of the printing press. Whether it serves as a warning to the populace that a pleasant neighborhood is no guarantee of safety, or as pure entertainment designed to satiate our innate curiosity about the unfathomable darkness that lies inside others, recent years have seen numerous examples explode into the cultural consciousness. Interestingly, it didn’t start to gain traction in movies until nearly 100 years after the invention of the medium, with Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line. Even after that, narrative films “based on a true story” are far more prevalent, despite the most common form in other mediums being reportage.

As such, despite the many podcasts and TV series that parody the genre (some award winning), there are precious few notable mockumentaries of true crime committed to celluloid. There’s the 1992 Belgian film Man Bites Dog, 2006’s Behind the Mask: The Rose of Leslie Vernon, and that’s about it. Both feature investigative reporting teams who’ve been given exclusive access to a serial killer as he goes about his routine/prep, building in an inherent forward motion, and keeping you engaged despite knowing that what you’re watching is not, in fact, real.

Strange Harvest attempts to wrong-foot you with its opening title card: “The following is considered one of the most unreported cases in Southern California history.” It would have to be: given how bizarre and infused with occult imagery the crimes described over the next ninety minutes are, the true crime podcast industrial complex would have an absolute field day. That said, writer/director Stuart Ortiz does a good job capturing the atmosphere of such a miniseries. He adopts many of the genre’s ticks, including utilizing “security camera” footage, distorted voices to read the killer’s letters, and bringing in “subject matter experts” to opine on the meaning of a piece of evidence. All of our time is spent with two detectives who worked the case, Joe Kirby and Lexi Taylor (Peter Zizzo and Terri Apple), as they walk us through the tale from start to finish while speaking direct to camera.

This fidelity makes Strange Harvest an excellent demonstration of the value of serialized storytelling mediums. When all the events must be conveyed in an unbroken block of time, more effort is required to keep the audience’s attention. As it is, a lot of the tricks they employ to keep viewers coming back for more are laid bare, but not in any pointed way that makes clear Ortiz is commenting upon them. In the lead up to each murder, they discuss the trail running cold, followed by a dramatic pause, then some comment like “And that’s when we saw it”, and a dramatic cut. They show local news reports, then the murder scene, followed by whatever raw footage they could recover, and then an overly specific discussion of the details of the body’s wounds. But after each murder, they essentially reset, having gained more data yet no further insight.

If anything, it highlights how incompetent police are when it comes to serial killers – the plot never advances from their actions, only those of others. Frequently, it’s another ritualistic murder accompanied by Mr. Shiny’s trademark sigil, or one of the cryptic, Zodiac-inspired letters he’s sent to the detectives. The murders he committed in the mid-90s were never solved, and the trail went cold for fifteen years, only picking up when he started killing again, and further taunting police. No matter how many clues they find, nothing ever falls into place, preventing them from tracking him down or even gaining any deeper understanding. While they are eventually able to identify him (due to a witness tipping them off), they seem no closer to catching him, nor are they better able to identify or protect his targets. All the intel they gather is for naught. The frustration it created in me may have been intentional, but it still made for quite a slog.

The film’s aesthetic provides no respite. They craft a few creepy images, mostly involving the appearance of Mr. Shiny’s Halloween-esque mask in the background of a shot. But the interviews which constitute the bulk of the runtime are all shot in an empty, featureless basement under flat lighting, causing the subjects to stand out so much that the blurry background wall feels like a green screen. Outside of that, the camerawork is all over the place, mostly made up of two kinds of shots. Either it’s locked down in an extremely convenient location that allows us to see the attack but not the violence, or it’s so shaky as to make it genuinely hard to see what’s going on. The VFX aren’t doing them any favors, either. The gore is good enough, but there’s a bizarre, otherworldly look to any mangled corpses. They look more diseased than beat up, and the coloration is strange, leading to online assertions it must be AI. Multiple people involved have confirmed there’s no AI in this film, just Photoshop. Regardless, the result is a bunch of confusingly fake looking images that immediately take you out of the shot as you try to figure out what’s going on. I’m sympathetic to the challenges inherent in low-budget filmmaking, but the best examples do a wonderful job hiding that reality, or at least distracting you from it. Strange Harvest does neither.

The reality is that mockumentaries are quite difficult to pull off, despite how effortless its titans (Christopher Guest, Sacha Baron Cohen, etc) make it look. True crime is an extra challenge, as their whole appeal is that this really happened. The script must be top-notch to sustain the illusion of reality and provide insight into human nature and depravity. Any video of the events must be carefully planned so as to not appear staged. And the film must (implicitly) make the case for why it’s not a miniseries or podcast. Ambitious as it may be, Strange Harvest is hemmed in by its microscopic budget, failing each of those tests. That doesn’t mean there’s no value to be extracted from it; the tone works much of the time, and the background threat of a greater terror is fertile ground. However, the experience as a whole is a let down, and fails to live up to the promise of its premise.