The death of the Friends star Matthew Perry was described as “sudden” on CBS News. In truth, it was decades in the making. Perry, by his own admission, was an alcoholic by the age of 14. Throughout his prodigiously successful acting career, he was engaged in a losing battle with various addictions. Sadly, finally, in 2023 his number came up after a struggle with another drug, one whose effects were right on the line between clinical and recreational. In his memoir, he had this to say about ketamine: “[It] has my name written all over it. They might as well have called it ‘Matty’.”
Jasveen Sangha is an MBA student turned drug dealer from Essex who ended up in Hollywood, labelled the Ketamine Queen. Did she sell Perry the drugs that killed him? This documentary exploring the circumstances around Perry’s death is the work of Amber Haque, who, among other things, is the co-host of the true-crime podcast Bad People. She finds no shortage of truly terrible people here: personal assistants and doctors, dealers and quacks, lining Perry’s road to perdition, cheering him on and milking him for whatever dirty dollars they could extract along the way.
And yet Haque never quite succeeds in connecting enough of the dots to make up the whole picture. It’s a pity because this is a story that should be told – if only to widely shame the truly contemptible likes of Dr Salvador Plasencia, who dangled grotesquely overpriced ketamine in front of a stricken Perry while texting a co-conspirator the question: “I wonder how much this moron will pay?” Plasencia has just been sentenced to 30 months in federal prison so, thankfully, was unavailable for interview here.
The problem is, Haque never settles on a central thesis. You sense she’d like this documentary to be about any number of loosely linked but also very particular things. The troubled life of Perry, the barely regulated free-for-all that is the US healthcare system, the Hollywood party scene, the potential benefits and dangers of ketamine, and the inconsistently apportioned blame in this particular case are all jostling for space. It’s too much. Too many interesting threads are pulled then simply left dangling. It’s a series of slightly speculative questions waiting for answers.
It’s possible that this might be a result of Haque’s work as a podcaster – given her magpie instinct to gather but not discard any strand of the saga, this may well have worked better as a story told in a series of bite-size chunks. Instead, there’s a disconnect between presenter and format that is filled by what sometimes feels like a checklist of modern documentary presentational cliches – Haque gazing into the middle distance while being driven through Hollywood; Haque exchanging pleasantries with an interviewee while the lighting is fixed.
True-crime content is, of course, drawn to the inconclusive; it thrives on open-endedness. It is one of its strengths but it’s also a curse. But there’s no great mystery to uncover here in a legal sense. Everyone knows the basic facts of this case: Perry was an addict, numerous people leeched on to him and exploited that for personal gain, and eventually, it killed him.
But there is a fascinating emotional narrative to be explored. The strongest parts of this film involve Haque attempting to piece together the motives of the people involved. The likes of Plasencia are basic and unenlightening, as naked greed generally is. But Sangha is a more complex and ambiguous figure. She comes from a wealthy family and presumably didn’t need the money. What was in it for her? Why become the Ketamine Queen?
Haque – who is a persuasive interviewer – sits down with Tony, one of Sangha’s old drug buddies, to try to find out. Sangha was a user as well as a dealer (some members of her posse experimented with rhino tranquillisers), so this wasn’t simply business for her. “What she got addicted to was being in that role,” Tony says. “Being wanted by someone with that status.” Is drug dealing (like, in the wrong hands, any kind of medical career) a power trip? Is it a form of self-validation? Is creating circumstances where others are utterly dependent on you a guilty buzz in itself? These questions begin to form in the mind of the viewer but are never really addressed.
And so, the two central figures in this sad story of human frailty remain elusive. As the film draws to its conclusion, Haque intones with great solemnity: “Jasveen Sangha is a drug dealer and she’s responsible for Matthew Perry’s death. But she isn’t the only one.” But we already knew that. That’s not documentary-making, that’s an elevator pitch. We need to know why. Why was Perry so prodigiously damaged? Why, for that matter, was Sangha? Why did they both need and destroy one another? One day, someone will make a film exploring these questions. This isn’t quite it.
• Matthew Perry and the Ketamine Queen aired on BBC Three and is on iPlayer now
