Review: Girl In The Picture

Image courtesy of Netflix.

The new Netflix documentary "Girl in the Picture" runs the gamut of reactions it'll likely elicit from its audience - fascination, horror, disgust, heartbreak - during the course of its often shocking, winding true crime story that would have seemed too outrageous to be true if we hadn't lived through the past few years in this country.

In lesser hands, the film could come off as lurid because - let's face it - the story that inspired it certainly is. But director Skye Borgman's film unequivocally expresses outrage at those in the wrong in this story - although documentaries typically take a side about what they present, they often do it more subtly, but in this case a different approach was warranted.

It's difficult to discuss the case at the center of the documentary without giving anything away - that is, if I could even remember all of the numerous twists that take place - but suffice it to say it's a fascinating tale. When the story opens, we learn of a tragedy in 1990 during which a young woman named Tonya Hughes was seemingly killed in a hit and run in Oklahoma, and several weeks later her young son is kidnapped.

The man at the center of all this is Clarence, Tonya's husband, who authorities automatically suspect in her death, especially after he kidnaps her young son from the school he attends in the middle of the day and takes the principal hostage at gunpoint before leaving him tied up in the woods nearby.

The investigators interviewed in the film - who apparently felt a personal responsibility to get to the bottom of this bizarre case to the extent that it haunted them for decades - note that they knew Clarence would be hard to track, and it's right about this time that I can't really give any away any more details - about who Tonya Hughes was and who Clarence was, two questions that keep resulting in different answers the deeper the authorities dug.

The wealth of interviews obtained for this film is astounding - and it includes Tonya's childhood friends, a co-worker at a strip club where Tonya worked, various law enforcement officials and several other family members whose presence in the picture is fairly shocking, considering how difficult it likely was to figure out how everyone fit into the case.

True crime documentaries are a dime a dozen these days - they're all over the place, and while the subject matter is frequently interesting, the execution is occasionally lacking. That's not the case with "Girl in the Picture," which is mesmerizing not only due to the strangeness of the case involved, but also the breadth of the interviews and the tracking of details for a case that spanned nearly 27 years. Those who watch it will likely be engrossed.