Aarcflick

 Another day, another addition to the shock value school of true crime documentaries; one that adds nothing to our understanding of a terrible crime or those who committed it, nothing to our safety as individuals or as a society, nothing but our appetite for voyeurism and its normalization. Most true crime documentaries belong to this school. Fred & Rose West: A British Horror Story is no exception. Perhaps the sordid, exploitative aspects of the genre are felt more keenly here precisely because this is one of our own stories, and one that many of us remember reading in the newspapers and seeing on the news when the horrific discoveries were made.  We usually watch these films with a certain distance. At least we can feel like we're learning about how terrible America can be, or that an otherwise forgotten victim among the mass of victims that evil people create has been commemorated. Here, we're confronted more fiercely by our complicity and the weakness of the arguments ...