Suspicion shortly turned to Peterson, a novelist, although the questions of motive unleashed a completely separate dimension to the proceedings, which attracted the eye of a French documentary crew keen to present a window within the US justice system.
This tackle “The Staircase” thus turns into as a lot concerning the media filter via which the case was seen because the precise occasions, at occasions painstakingly replicating the grainy look of the unique with actors standing in for the characters. The result’s a manufacturing that consistently appears to be reassessing what we all know, versus what we would suppose or assume, about what transpired.
Give a lot of the credit score to Firth for conveying Peterson’s complexity, hinging on whether or not he shared his attraction to males together with his spouse, or if that a part of him remained secret and will have been related to her loss of life. There’s additionally the difficulty of how prosecutors leveraged that data, recognizing the way it would possibly play to a jury in 2003.
Normally, a undertaking that felt this inherently messy can be a bit irritating. With “The Staircase,” although, there’s methodology to the insanity, because it seeks to seize the story with all its intricacies, and the typically elusive pursuit of placing the reality in true crime.
“The Staircase” premieres May 5 on HBO Max, which, like CNN, is a unit of Warner Bros. Discovery.
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