There is always a moment, towards the start of any true-crime documentary, where you ask yourself: what is going to happen to make this interesting? For the ranks of morbid voyeurs, mere murder or manslaughter are not enough – the tale must have more twists and turns than Pac-Man’s heat map. Such are the expectations of the genre, at least; expectations that Netflix’s latest offering,I Just Killed My Dad, strives to subvert.
“Why do you think it’s important to tell your story?” a disembodied voice asks a nervous, gawky-looking 18-year-old as he settles himself in a chair. The kid is Anthony Templet who, shortly before the Covid pandemic (yes, that’s how I measure time now), shot his father in the house that they shared, three times, killing him. “I just killed my dad,” he tells the 911 operator in a call so ice-cold and devoid of emotion, you’ll think that there is no way he can salvage our sympathies. But the show – presented, for some reason, over three episodes rather than as a two-hour feature – attempts to do exactly that. Anthony’s troubled home life, the forgotten injustices and deprivations of his childhood, and the true nature of the victim’s despotism fall under the filmmakers’ microscope, unravelling a tricky self-defence argument.
