If you want to watch a true crime documentary that will haunt you for several days, then you should definitely watch the Netflix’s documentary: Unknown Number: The High School Catfish. Don’t even think about what you have already known about catfishing – this one is the absolute 12th league of its own. It’s the exploration of a once-happening online bullying case that the hate fans of the couple acquainted with the net figured out not who but why the antagonist was of them.
At the beginning, the story unfolds in a small town of Michigan where life of a seemingly typical teenage couple Lauryn & Owen gets turned over upside down; they start to get sent/receiving abusive texts in huge quantities. However, those were not just a couple of random abusive messages; the messages were persistent and detailed so much so that the sender seemed to know everything about the teenagers’ lives, from jokes shared between friends to secrets kept at home.
These texts were created in such a way as to attract and to lure victims playing the role of another girl pretending to steal Owen from Lauryn; it was a wicked scheme to rip them apart from the inside. For some time, everyone – the friends, the officers of the law – was totally baffled. Who could do such a thing on earth?
The story told in a documentary really captures the audience’s sympathies with the characters as well as the emotional impact of the incident on all the people involved in it. You can almost feel their panic and apprehension, and that’s exactly what the production does with Lauryn and Owen. It’s a type of stress that one can easily relate to, but here it’s taken to the extreme level of magnification.
The Unbelievable Twist
Just when you think it can’t get any more surprising or unusual, the documentary reveals a new astonishing fact that will stun you. The clues in the mystery theaters finally trace the messages back to the origin and decisively break the case wide open after months of investigating with no leads. That’s where the story turns from a simple catfishing case to something very disquieting.
Firstly, the person who was behind the anonymous number and wasn’t a jealous classmate, a random cyberbully, or a boy trying to mess with their relationship is Lauryn’s mother, Kendra Licari. It turns out that it was Lauryn’s mother’s phone Kendra was using!
This is the main theme of the documentary, and it is conveyed in quite a respectful manner. You get to see the immediate shock and denial in the reaction from all the people involved. The truth is difficult to understand. Why would a mother go to the extent that she haunts her own daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend? The documentary doesn’t provide a straightforward, easy-to-understand answer, which is what makes it so haunting. It’s just not a crime story, but a portrayal of a deep psychological unraveling.
The Troubling Motives and Broader Impact
The documentary delves into some reasons that might have led Kendra to take such a step. It turns out that she was lying to her family when she claimed she was employed. She had been laid off and was hiding it. This film insinuates that this personal turmoil and a feeling of losing grip in her life might have been the reason for her reaching out for control in a manipulated and destructive manner.
Weird things about her, like her strangely personal behavior towards Owen, also make you wonder whether there’s something more profound going on. It really is an incredibly disturbing portrayal of a person who’s completely lost their way.
“Unknown Number: The High School Catfish” tells a captivating story, not due to its suspenseful nature, but because it is a living warning of trust in the ones who seem the most reliable. It teaches us that dangers in the digital realm are not always from unknown individuals who use the web.
They may be from areas that you have the least suspicion. The film is a very impressive and unsettling one as it questions the concepts of deception, treason, and secret lives of people. It definitely will amaze those who still believe that the world is full of surprises because this story is more peculiar and agonizing than any other one of fiction genre.
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