Summary
A fascinating true-crime miniseries about how a sadistic killer and the internet-savvy cat lovers who helped to track him down.
As a cat owner, I can tell you with some degree of confidence that they hate you. But the new three-part true-crime docuseries Don’t F*ck With Cats: Hunting An Internet Killer (Netflix) suggests they might have a point. Over three episodes, it chronicles the sadistic crimes of Canadian killer Luka Magnotta and the internet-savvy cat lovers who helped to track him down after he posted a video to YouTube entitled “1 boy 2 kittens” in which he deliberately suffocated two kittens with a vacuum cleaner.
Since cruelty to animals is almost always a precursor to cruelty to human beings, the online community who began the manhunt knew on some level that they were after a serial killer in the making. The depths of Magnotta’s depravity are shocking; his crimes escalate to feeding a kitten alive to a Burmese python, and then killing and dismembering Chinese international student Lin Jun and mailing his hands and feet to elementary schools and federal political party offices in his native Vancouver.
This, in some way, helps to excuse the somewhat flippant title and tone of Don’t F*ck With Cats: Hunting An Internet Killer; given a straightlaced treatment, it would have perhaps been too sadistic, too heinous, to qualify as any kind of entertainment. As things stand, by choosing to focus on the unlikely amateur sleuths who contributed in Magnotta’s apprehension in a distinctly modern and unconventional way, the docuseries manages to locate what is fascinating about the case beyond its obvious horror. Like some of Netflix’s recent efforts in this field, Don’t F*ck With Cats is proof that there are new true-crime stories to be told, and in new ways; while the atrocities human beings are capable of committing remain surprising, so too do the ways in which right-minded individuals mobilize to thwart them.
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