The sound of barrel-scraping during true-crime documentaries is becoming more and more frequent at Netflix these days (the dismal Worst Neighbor Ever being the most recent case in point). Such are the perils of being the pioneer of a form; you run out of material first but must keep trying to recapture past glories while you search desperately for another way to seize the fickle audience’s attention once again.
A Toxic Love Story is a welcome, if doubtless temporary, return to form. It is a rigorous, 88-minute recounting of an astonishing story that became notorious about 10 years ago in the US and was known as “the Anaheim Craigslist case” or “the Anaheim Craigslist rape fantasy case”, depending on just how many local Craigslist-based delinquencies were occurring at the exact time of reference. It has, after all, been the most criminally fertile of lists.
