The Bunker is an unnerving true-crime documentary about an astonishing kidnapping advised in an uncommon and disturbing means. Its three episodes arrive Thursday on Viaplay and have not solely a weird crime, but additionally a made-for-TV therapeutic method.
Isabel Eriksson was working as an escort in Stockholm in 2015 when a consumer drugged her, kidnapped her and locked her and her small canine in an elaborate bunker. She lived by way of that ordeal and tells the story in her personal phrases right here, daring and clear. The opening chiron tells us, “Because the kidnapping, Isabelle hasn’t processed her trauma,” and the episodes embrace scenes of her speaking to a trauma therapist. This therapist additionally says that Erickson holds again in entrance of the digital camera.
However the weirdest half about “The Bunker” is that they rebuild the bunker and Erickson visits it as a therapeutic train. This simulacrum is depicted alongside loads of footage of the particular bunker, and the blurring of actuality and leisure right here is each intriguing and unsettling. The story feels prefer it was ripped from a creepy Scandinavian thriller, and the documentary performs with that tainted familiarity, utilizing a pretend set to recreate an actual state of affairs that brings to thoughts a ton of fiction based mostly on actual depravity.
Many of the scenes listed here are shot in blue-tinted shadows, and even the remedy classes happen in a darkish, basement area with wooden paneling, a nook sofa, and a glass brick window on the high of the wall. “The Bunker” additionally performs lengthy stretches of audio of the kidnapper’s confessions to the police, which awkwardly double as a how-to information for aspiring monsters.
The whole lot right here would appear like a sickening cliché… besides it is true. “It is a disgrace,” says one neighbor, that she did not get to know the kidnapper higher – “I would attempt to make him a extremely good man,” she sighs and laughs. “However that is the way it goes.” She believes Erickson is “considerably” responsible, although she does not elaborate.
The Bunker raises tough questions in regards to the advertising and marketing of struggling, about trauma as a commodity, about (seemingly) survivor-driven voyeurism, in regards to the fictional angle of remedy as leisure—or maybe about therapeutic as efficiency. Or maybe on efficiency as therapeutic.
