Film

Casting JonBenet

Kitty Green auditions actors to play the Ramsey family and lets them talk about their own lives, theories, and traumas instead of ever staging the murder itself. It's less true-crime doc than meditation on obsession and projection — unsettling, formally daring, and more interested in why we can't stop imagining this story than in solving it.

TMDb rating5.6

If you liked this

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst2015

Andrew Jarecki's docuseries uses eerie reenactments and a slow-burn structure to interrogate how true crime narrative shapes what we believe. Same fascination with performance as evidence.

But The pacing is deliberate and the final episode's notoriety may have already been spoiled for you.

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst poster

Soupçons2004

Jean-Xavier de Lestrade's original documentary series watches a case fracture into competing stories, much like Green's film shows a murder fracturing into competing performances.

But It's long, methodical, and offers no tidy resolution — frustrating if you want closure.

Soupçons poster

Wormwood2017

Errol Morris blends interviews with stylised dramatic reenactments starring actual actors, questioning whether restaging trauma gets you closer to truth or further away.

But Its hybrid form is disorienting on purpose, and some find the reenactments overwrought.

Wormwood poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Act of Killing2012

Both films hand real people the tools of fiction to reenact violence and watch what surfaces — theatricality as a way of getting at truth no interview could reach.

Joshua Oppenheimer has real perpetrators of mass killings reenact their crimes in the film genres they love — gangster, musical, western — producing a documentary about performance as confession, exactly Green's method turned toward atrocity.

But It is genuinely harrowing, morally disorienting, and not something to watch lightly.

The Act of Killing poster
More like this (8)

I'll Be Gone in the Dark2020

Michelle McNamara's obsession with an unsolved case becomes the real subject, much like Green's film cares more about America's fixation than the crime itself.

But Genuinely upsetting material, and the true author's death casts a heavy shadow throughout.

I'll Be Gone in the Dark poster

The Act2019

A dramatized true-crime series that leans into performance and unreliable narration around a notorious American family, echoing the theatrical strangeness of the Ramsey story.

But It fictionalizes real trauma quite freely, which some viewers find distasteful.

The Act poster

Making a Murderer2015

A landmark in binge-able true crime that turns audience participation and theorizing into part of the show itself — the exact impulse Green's film examines.

But It's one-sided by design and sparked real controversy about its fairness.

Making a Murderer poster

American Crime Story2016

A dramatization of a media-saturated crime that became a mirror for a divided public, much as JonBenet's case became a projection screen for America's anxieties.

But It's a full drama series, glossier and more conventional than anything documentary.

American Crime Story poster

Dirty John2018

A soapy true-crime dramatization that knows exactly how entertaining true crime can be while still gesturing at real damage underneath.

But It's pulpier and less interested in interrogating the genre than Green's film is.

Dirty John poster

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness2020

An extreme case study in how a real crime story gets swallowed by spectacle, performance, and public appetite for absurdity.

But It's broad and often played for laughs, a much shallower dive than Green's approach.

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness poster

Close-Up1990

Same structural trick as Green's film — casting real subjects to reenact their own story — but done in 1990, in Persian, as gentle character study rather than true-crime unease.

Kiarostami has the real people involved in a bizarre impersonation case play themselves reenacting events, blurring documentary and fiction decades before it was fashionable.

But It's a slow, contemplative Iranian arthouse film with subtitles and no crime-thriller momentum.

Close-Up poster

Toddlers & Tiaras2009no page yet

Where Green's film is a considered meditation on the pageant world's role in the murder, this is the raw, unfiltered subculture itself — same world, zero critical remove, much trashier register.

This unscripted reality series drops you straight into the child pageant world JonBenet came from, no commentary needed — the pageant culture speaks for itself.

But It's trashy, uncomfortable reality television with none of the artistic distance or intent Green brings.

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Recommended by

The Imposter, Amanda Knox, Tickled, Room 237, American Murder: The Family Next Door, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, I'll Be Gone in the Dark, To Die For, The Bling Ring, Beware the Slenderman, The Guilty