Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.American filmmaker Errol Morris has in his time been an extraordinary innovator; his groundbreaking stylistic hybrid The Thin Blue Line (1988) could be said to have invented the modern true-crime documentary. Now his new Netflix offering Chaos: The Manson Murders promises to shed fresh light on the most mythicised of modern American horror stories.Inspired by the 2019 book Chaos by Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring, the film re-examines the murders committed over two nights in August 1969 by members of Charles Manson’s “Family”. Interviewed here, O’Neill insists: “What we were told isn’t what happened.” His alternative version revolves around CIA experiments in mind control (Morris previously ventured into this territory in his 2017 docudrama series Wormwood). Were the throngs of young truth-seekers at Haight-Ashbury in the late 1960s in fact unwitting guinea pigs for The Man?Key witnesses in the film include former Manson associates, among them convicted killer Bobby Beausoleil. Much of the jigsaw will be more than familiar, but the riddle holding it all together is the question of how Manson became an irresistible guru to his acolytes. Was he given the power for nefarious political purposes?Interviewing O’Neill, Morris comments, “It’s hard for me to believe that this is being orchestrated by the federal government . . . ”, introducing a note of scepticism towards the journalist’s byzantine account (though many critics found O’Neill’s book persuasive and thought-provoking). Given the film’s hyperbolic visual style, including collaged torrents of photos and news clippings, you wonder whether Chaos is Morris’s oblique satire on such speculation — or on our credulity. An Errol Morris film seriously grappling with the current epidemic of conspiracy theory would be worth watching, but Chaos is hardly that film. One of the director’s most notable political documentaries was called The Fog of War: here he seems happy to wander in the impenetrable fog of “what if”.★★☆☆☆On Netflix from March 7
