There's no shortage of screen material about Ted Kaczynski. Discovery's Manhunt: Unabomber put Paul Bettany in the cabin in 2017, and Tony Stone's Ted K gave Sharlto Copley the role in 2021. So the obvious question facing UNABOMBER, released on Netflix on September 25, 2026, is whether there's anything left to say. Based on the synopsis, the filmmakers think there is, and their answer is Harvard.

Directed by Janus Metz, the film stars Jacob Tremblay as Kaczynski, Russell Crowe as Professor Henry Murray and Shailene Woodley as fictional FBI agent Joanne Miller. The official overview frames the film as a transformation story, following Kaczynski from Harvard prodigy to the man who terrorized the country for nearly two decades. Crucially, it foregrounds the psychological experiments run by Murray, then cuts forward to the manhunt led by Miller. That dual timeline is the pitch: the controversial experiences in a Cambridge lab, and the reckoning that arrives decades later.

It's a smart angle, and it's rooted in documented history. Kaczynski arrived at Harvard in 1958 at just 16, a math prodigy who'd skipped grades. Starting the following year, he was one of roughly two dozen undergraduates who took part in a multi-year study run by Murray, the Harvard psychologist best known for co-developing the Thematic Apperception Test and for his wartime work with the OSS. Participants wrote out their personal philosophies and were later subjected to what Murray himself described as vehement, sweeping and personally abusive attacks on those beliefs, delivered under bright lights while they were filmed and wired to monitors. Journalist Alston Chase examined the connection at length in his 2003 book Harvard and the Unabomber, and it has been debated ever since.

That debate is where the film's approach matters most. It's one thing to dramatize the experiments. It's another to imply they explain what came after. Kaczynski went on to earn a PhD at the University of Michigan and took an assistant professorship at UC Berkeley, which he quit in 1969. His bombing campaign ran from 1978 to 1995, killing three people and injuring 23 others. Any script that draws a straight causal line from Murray's lab to those bombs risks turning a murderer into a victim, and audiences, not to mention the families of the people he killed, will notice. The better version of this movie treats the Harvard material as context, not an excuse.

The manhunt half comes with its own built-in drama, much of it well documented. The FBI's UNABOM investigation became one of the longest and most expensive in the Bureau's history. The decisive lead came after The Washington Post, in cooperation with The New York Times, published Kaczynski's 35,000-word manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, in September 1995. His brother David Kaczynski and David's wife, Linda Patrik, recognized the writing and ideas, and after agonizing over it, went to authorities. Agents arrested Ted at his cabin near Lincoln, Montana, on April 3, 1996. He pleaded guilty in 1998, received life without parole, and died in federal custody in June 2023.

Worth flagging: the synopsis centers the manhunt on Joanne Miller, a fictional character, while the historical investigation was run by a large, multi-agency task force rather than a single agent. Fictionalized investigators are standard practice in true-crime dramas, but the choice tells you something about the film's priorities. It suggests a structure built around a central investigator's point of view, which is how Manhunt approached it too, with Sam Worthington's profiler as the protagonist.

True crime reliably draws curiosity, and Kaczynski's death in 2023 renewed attention on his case. Still, curiosity isn't the same as necessity. The Murray angle is the most distinctive thing this film has going for it, and it's material that previous adaptations mostly touched on rather than built around. If UNABOMBER commits to that story with rigor, and resists the temptation to romanticize its subject, it could be the version that finally feels definitive. If it doesn't, it'll be the third Kaczynski drama in under a decade, and that's a hard sell in any season.