Summary
Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart is, for the most part, a fairly standard true-crime documentary, but the first-hand accounts from Elizabeth herself give it real value.
It’s always a big deal when children go missing – as well it should be – and an especially big deal, at least in terms of media coverage, when pretty, white, female children go missing. This is perhaps why the disappearance of Elizabeth Smart, who was kidnapped from her home at knifepoint and eventually rescued nine months later after a terrifying ordeal, dominated the 24-hour news cycle in 2002 and has been the subject of countless books, documentaries, specials, and TV dramas in the years since.
With this in mind, you’d think there’s be little point to Netflix’s documentary Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart. But what feels like the streamer – almost single-handedly responsible for catapulting the true-crime genre to meteoric popularity through Making A Murderer – scraping the bottom of the barrel to retell old stories without covering any new ground, reveals itself to have tremendous value in the inclusion of Elizabeth herself, now an advocate for survivors of sexual violence. Her testimony is frank and unflinching, providing an intimate, deeply personal lens through which to view the heinous experiences she was subjected to.
This isn’t the first time that Netflix has recognised the value of first-hand accounts. But it’s especially obvious here, since the pacey 90 minutes would otherwise be extremely standard fare, with the usual talking heads – comprising relatives, police officers who investigated the case, and the media who covered it – and a combination of archive materials and very understated bits of dramatic re-enactment recounting the story of Elizabeth’s kidnapping chronologically. The relatives – Elizabeth’s sister Mary Katherine, who was the only witness to the abduction, and her father Ed – provide some emotional contouring, but for the most part, director Benedict Sanderson keeps things efficient but unremarkable.
This is until about the midpoint, when Elizabeth herself is interviewed, revisiting earlier events in the timeline and giving them new context from her perspective. When Elizabeth was only 14, she was taken from the bedroom she shared with her sister by a man who cautioned her that she would be killed if she didn’t follow his instructions. He led her through the back yard of her sprawling family home in the affluent Federal Heights neighborhood of Salt Lake City, and up into the woods, where she was led to a campsite and introduced to a female accomplice. She was held for months and raped repeatedly by a man who claimed to have been put to the task by God himself.
Elizabeth’s sheltered, privileged upbringing – her parents were devoted members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, well-off and well-respected by the community – provides an obliviousness that makes for chilling accounts of being in her captor’s clutches. And yet her spirit was never dampened, and it was largely through her own intuition and resilience that she was ever able to be rescued. Law enforcement, certainly, were inclined to drag their feet, chasing up wrong leads by looking too closely at the family – supported by statistics and ravenous reporters – and limiting that family’s own interrogations of the event, despite Mary Katherine, admittedly only nine years of age at the time, being the only witness and consistently adamant that the man eventually arrested by the police was innocent.
It was through a sudden realisation by Mary Katherine that the real culprit was eventually identified – a nutcase pedophile named Brian David Mitchell, who believed himself, or at least claimed to believe himself, God’s messenger on Earth. His wife, Wanda Barzee, was his accomplice. Both were often seen in and around Salt Lake begging, and it’s through a sketch likeness dragged from Mary Katherine’s memory, released publicly against the police’s advice, that Elizabeth was able to be rescued.
Elizabeth, who is now married with three children and has become a fierce advocate for survivors of similar traumas, turns the documentary on its head about 40 minutes in. The latter half is significantly more powerful as a result, and the strength of her testimony gives Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart real value, even in this oversaturated market.
