Kitty Green’s avant garde documentary allows people auditioning to play JonBenét Ramsey and her family to expound their conspiracy theories about the unsolved murder of the child beauty pageant star

Is it a crime documentary? A satire of prurient crime documentaries? A drama? A piece of avant garde theatre? Casting JonBenét is all of these, and a brilliant original in multiple dimensions. The raw material of the unsolved 1996 murder of six-year-old US child pageant beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey is twisted and turned to fit dozens of different conspiracy theories.

Australian director Kitty Green repeats the trick she used in her excellent 2015 short The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul – holding auditions for a drama that may or may not exist. Various hopefuls try out to play JonBenét, her parents, her brother, the police chief and a sinister paedophile. Their auditions are occasionally played for laughs: we don’t know why, but one police chief wannabe explains his whipping tactics for rough sex in great detail. Those auditioning to play the brother try hitting a watermelon as hard as they can, unleashing their inner psychopaths.

JonBenét Ramsey: the brutal child murder that still haunts America Read more

Mostly, the auditions are a chance for the actors, who appear to be locals with detailed and enthusiastic knowledge of the case, to profess their pet theories about what happened to JonBenét. The film is a Netflix Original, and although every statement made is based on publicly available information, the platform’s lawyers must have had lengthy fun assessing how close some wilder theories come to libel.

However, this isn’t really a film in search of a definitive truth – it’s a deliberate provocation to the conventional notion of truth in the age of media frenzies over salacious crime. There are only opinions, and facts are pliable – a very pertinent theory considering the current news agenda. Green has some fun with the multiple personalities individuals play. The credits include a long list of roles such as “John Ramsey/John Ramsey Auditionee/Himself”. Many of the actors seem convinced this was a sex crime, and there’s a smart critical undercurrent about the sexualisation of young girls in small-town America, culminating in a daring final scene that features a surreal and garish performance by the title character.

American obsession: how JonBenét Ramsey gave rise to the online detective Read more

The casting of JonBenét herself is a very small part of the film. The various JonBenéts are most noticeable through their ear-piercing screams – ready yourself for them. The film is more about all the auditioning parents, whose voices build to a cacophonous roar of judgmental ideas, faux concern, over-sharing, and schlocky performances. It is a documentary that seems to have an audacious set piece every five minutes. It places the parental couples in ever more strange situations, but the best is saved for last. A long montage features every possible configuration of Mother, Father, Daughter and Son in a large studio space. Some of them are sleeping, some are arguing, some are comforting. Every theory about JonBenét’s murder is played out simultaneously. It’s far too much to process, and it’s utterly magnificent.

Green appears to be having great fun, and it’s very exciting that she’s been given the budget and licence to make such an experimental piece of work for such a large audience. The film may anger some people: there are ethical discussions to be had about taking private grief and turning it into an intellectual and artistic game without (presumably) the consent of all the real people concerned. It’s also unclear how aware the actors are of the final shape that the film they’re taking part in will take. But really, its provoking of complicated internal debates about the nature of art and our appetite for true crime is what makes Casting JonBenét stay with you for a long time after watching.

This year’s Sundance has some important political and current affairs documentaries, but this one must be the most progressive and exciting one showing here, existing in a narrative universe all of its own.