Jacob Tremblay plays Ted Kaczynski at 17, when the future Unabomber entered a CIA-funded psychological experiment that he thought would sharpen his debating skills. The new drama turns that college-age test into the first pressure point in a story that later lands on the FBI closing in on him in 1996.
Henry Murray and the experiment
Henry Murray, played by Russell Crowe, devised and conducted the experiments around the same principle: expose a subject to systemic verbal abuse and watch how quickly the will starts to crack. That setup gives the drama its engine, because it turns the college setting into a controlled breakdown rather than a simple campus memory.
The film’s focus stays on Ted Kaczynski as a teenager already marked by social awkwardness, a grandiose self-conception and a troubled family. Jacob Tremblay has to carry that contradiction: a boy who enters the room believing he is training for debate, while the scene is really about pressure, humiliation and what a structured attack on confidence can do to a young mind.
1996 and the FBI
1996 is where the film jumps from origin to pursuit, with the FBI beginning to close in on Kaczynski after the package bombs that had killed three people and injured 23 between 1978 and 1995. The move gives the drama a hard timeline: the private experiment in the late 1950s, then the public case that made him the Unabomber nearly two decades later.
Shailene Woodley plays the FBI agent who starts to suspect that Kaczynski is the Unabomber, and that thread keeps the movie from becoming a single-person origin story. It also keeps the investigation in view while the film revisits how he targeted university professors and others he blamed for industrial society.
The Industrial Revolution line
The movie does not explicitly argue that the abuse made Kaczynski the public menace he became, but it leans hard enough to make the connection hard to ignore. That friction is the point: the film shows a psychological experiment designed to break a subject down, then cuts to the man who later mailed death in packages for nearly two decades.
Major American newspapers published the Unabomber’s 35,000-word manifesto, and the line that stayed with his family was the one that said everything had been going downhill since the Industrial Revolution. I’d watch this for the way it treats the experiment as a mechanism, not a myth: less a neat origin story than a reminder that a curriculum of humiliation can echo far beyond the classroom.
