Michelle Carter gets a new hearing

Everyone around Michelle Carter, who was 17 years old when her 18-year-old boyfriend Conrad Roy, committed suicide in July 2014, certainly seemed to believe it. As it was discovered shortly after Roy's death, Carter had texted Roy several times a day in the weeks leading up to his suicide, encouraging – might even say pushing him – to end his life. Out of their context, his words are chilling. (Instead of saying "hello," she asked, "are you going to do it today?", For example.) Once these troubling texts were made public, the media portrayed Carter as a caricature perverse millennium. Apathy, a sociopath who has manipulated a vulnerable young man so that he kills himself in order to sympathize with social media. The state of Massachusetts seemed to agree that Carter will be subject to an involuntary manslaughter trial in 2017. The reality is much more complicated, a truth that Carr does not discover and does not discover in his documentary.

The biggest obstacle to getting a complete picture I love you, die now did not Michelle Carter's family or Carter herself agree to participate in the film? And that may be understandable, given not only Carter's defamation in the press, but also the fact that she is currently sentenced to five months in prison. But the fact of not having first – hand accounts from his relatives no doubt was a drag on Carr 's efforts to find out what was really going on in Carter' s mind. Several members of Roy's family appear in front of the camera. The seriousness of his mental illness and the emotional devastation that has taken him since his death are a good part of the first part of the documentary. Carter's character witnesses, meanwhile, are second-hand: psychiatrists, journalists, his defense counsel, Joseph Cataldo, and a handful of classmates who thought that it was strange even before all of this happens. Thus, while the details of his case and its legal implications are set out in great detail, Carter remains a question mark herself, a white middle-class girl with a vague resemblance to Cara Delevingne who appeared like a nice person, but could very well have pretended. Or maybe his ability to distinguish fantasy from reality was psychotic. Or maybe it's the anti-depressants that made him do it.

Carter's personality questions and motivations Carr has no real answers. But she has a shrewd retort to the misconceptions and sexist judgments that appear in most people's minds when reading Carter's texts. Carr splashes these texts on the screen throughout the first part of I like you, die now-A genuinely multimedia touch in a genre that too often plays like a podcast with stock photos – and his remarks are no less shocking with repeated exposure. ("Drink bleach, drink some bleach," she said at one point to Roy.) Then, once the image of the training of a black widow from a soulless suburb is well anchored in the viewer 's mind, Carr goes back, giving the context. both the relationship and the text messages themselves that question everything we think we know about Michelle Carter. In short, Carr catches the hook to show us how easy it is to get caught.

This context has been seriously underreported in Michelle Carter's case coverage, and even those who have followed it since the first news may be surprised by the information presented in the case. I love you, die now. These same followers will also be interested to learn that the documentary makes extensive use of exclusive sequences from the Carter trial, where Carr's team was the only authorized cameraman in the audience room. It is this journalistic advantage that compensates I love you, die now »s limitations, both as a character study and as a movie piece. (The cliffhanger / inversion structure, though exceptionally well executed here, is after all quite common in real crime.) And since the case eventually ended up with a 45 minute phone call including only the content knows Michelle Carter, asking the right questions can be the best possible – unless the Supreme Court decides to hear her case, at least.