Last weekend saw the US release of the new documentary Three Identical Strangers, a historical footnote too unlikely for anyone to have dreamt up. During the 80s, three young men named Robert Shaffran, Edward Galland, and David Kellman discovered that they were identical triplets separated at birth, and the story only got stranger from there. The film’s unlikely, yet entirely true, set of twists helped to turn it into another fact-based smash, boasting the year’s best per-screen average for a documentary to date.

Three Identical Strangers: the bizarre tale of triplets separated at birth Read more

Real life gives writerly invention a run for its money in this outlandish-but-true tale, but it’s far from the first documentary to wrestle factual events into the shape of a suspenseful mystery. Consider the following sampling of documentaries in which the truth is far stranger (or darker, or sadder) than fiction, and keep your wits about you:

The Overnighters

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions … the North Dakota preacher Jay Reinke was doing a goodness when he opened the doors of his church to all those in need of shelter after the local oil boom dried up and affordable housing became scarce. But some unanticipated revelations in the film’s final minutes call Reinke’s intentions into question. The rare film about a religious figure without necessarily being about religion, it takes a complicated moral inventory of the man at its center.

Capturing the Friedmans

Before he caught Robert Durst on the hot mic, Andrew Jarecki trained his focus on a subject just as lurid for this HBO TV movie. He was working on a short film about party clowns when he encountered David “Silly Billy” Friedman, a popular hire in the New York area for birthday parties. While researching Friedman, he stumbled into a morass of dysfunction the likes of which he couldn’t have imagined: David’s brother, Jesse, and their father, Arnold, were jointly convicted of child sexual abuse, and the hours of home movies from which Jarecki stitched together stretches of his film suggest a festering id beneath the veneer of a polite American family.

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father

It sounds like something out of a midcentury melodrama: a love affair, obsession, murder. Andrew Bagby wanted to end his relationship with his older lover, Shirley Turner, but she had other plans. After she drove over 1,000 miles to convince him to take her back, Bagby was found shot to death and Turner fled to Canada. She took advantage of every legal loophole she could find to prolong her extradition, and set off a legal battle for custody when she announced that she was pregnant with Bagby’s child. Much of this film revolves around the director attempting to compile a remembrance of his personal friend Bagby for the infant son Bagby will never know, and yet this too turns out to be futile in a devastating final blow.

Catfish

Because this documentary singlehandedly launched the term “catfishing” into the public vernacular, the surprises come to modern audiences pre-spoiled. Even so, there’s a certain perverse pleasure in watching the guileless Nev Schulman fall into one woman’s web of deception. Nev’s brother, Ariel, chronicled the flirtation between Nev and Megan, the half-sister of a youth artist who had painted one of his photos. Eventually, they decided to make the journey to Michigan and meet Megan in real life, but what they fould was far from what was advertised. Lies pile on top of lies wedged between bunches of other lies in this engrossingly depraved account of romantic desperation.

Voyeur

Gerald Foos spent years silently perched in a custom-made platform above the rooms of his Colorado motel, watching his visitors talk, watch TV, sleep and have lots and lots of sex. Foos sent the dutiful catalogue of his observances to the celebrated writer Gay Talese in the hopes that together, they could publish the findings as a social experiment of the most taboo order. This documentary traces Talese’s process of preparing his report on the so-called “voyeur motel”, a compromised work of journalism that goes through a release fraught with unexpected reversals of fortune all its own. The directors stack Foos’ lecherous leering against Talese’s questionable journalistic processes, each just as invasive as the other.

The Imposter

Bart Layton found an endlessly fascinating subject in Frédéric Bourdin, a French con artist who impersonated an estimated 500 hundred identities in a sprawling spree of trickery and grift. His misdeeds only caught up with him when he attempted to stand in for a Texan who had disappeared years earlier, at age 13. Though they bore only the vaguest resemblance to one another, Bourdin’s charming and subtly forceful personality successfully convinced several members of the boy’s own family that their son had returned. Or did they? Bourdin leaves the film on an uncertain note when he makes the unsettling suggestion that the family may have had a good reason to readily accept this fake’s return as their son – that they are his killers. The hypothesis, however, comes from a recreational and professional liar.