Film

There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane

Liz Garbus's unflinching investigation into the 2009 Taconic Parkway crash that killed eight people, including Diane Schuler herself. The film resists easy answers, instead following a family's desperate attempts to reconcile the woman they knew with the toxicology report. Harrowing, intimate, and morally complex.

TMDb rating3.3

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The Staircase2022

HBO's methodical true-crime series about a man convicted of his wife's death, with all the obsessive detail-gathering and unanswered questions that made Aunt Diane so compelling. Jean-Michel Frère's direction finds tragedy in ambiguity.

But At eight hours it demands serious commitment, and the tone can feel heavy-handed in ways Garbus avoided.

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The Thin Blue Line1988

Errol Morris's landmark documentary proves that stylish filmmaking and moral gravity aren't opposed—they amplify each other. Like Garbus, Morris refuses to settle the argument for you, letting evidence and doubt coexist.

But The 1988 production quality may feel dated, and Morris's aesthetic choices some find mannered.

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Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father2008

Kurt Kuenne's devastating portrait of a murdered friend and his orphaned son. It shares Aunt Diane's willingness to follow grief and complexity wherever they lead, with no protective distance between viewer and family.

But The emotional intensity is genuinely destabilizing. This is not a comfortable watch.

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father poster

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The Crown2016

Both examine how families and institutions conspire to obscure uncomfortable truths, and what price is paid by those deemed inconvenient.

Seasons three and four examine how power and secrecy warp family bonds—specifically how Diana's crisis becomes spectacle while the institution protects itself through denial and spin. Like Aunt Diane, it's about the gap between public story and private truth.

But It's a prestige drama, not a documentary, so the emotional payoffs are constructed rather than discovered. Some find the show's sympathy for the monarchy ethically troubling.

The Crown poster
More like this (8)

Capturing the Friedmans2003

Andrew Jarecki's masterpiece about a family destroyed by accusation and shame. Like Aunt Diane, it asks whether documentary can ever truly know the people it examines, and what we owe them in the asking.

But The found-footage aesthetic feels dated now, and the ambiguity may frustrate those wanting clarity.

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Godless2017

A western where the moral center keeps shifting beneath your feet. Seven episodes of beautifully shot moral uncertainty—what looks like villainy contains complexity, what seems clear becomes murky. The Diane Schuler of narratives.

But It's deliberately unsettling rather than cathartic. Some find the refusal to judge characters exhausting rather than enlightening.

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The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst2015

Andrew Jarecki returns with a six-part investigation into a billionaire's possible serial murder. It has Aunt Diane's investigative rigor and its willingness to sit with unknowability, even as the evidence mounts.

But Durst's charisma and the sensational details can overshadow the documentary's moral questions.

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst poster

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief2015

Alex Gibney's HBO investigation into institutional systems that shape identity. Like Garbus, Gibney is interested in how people rationalize and defend belief systems even when the evidence contradicts them.

But It's polemical rather than open-ended, tilting toward accusation in ways Aunt Diane doesn't.

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The Act2019

Gypsy Rose Blanchard's story—mother and daughter, deception, hidden psychology. Focuses intently on how we misread the people closest to us, and what secrets families keep.

But The dramatization can feel exploitative, and the true-crime format sometimes flattens the documentary's ethical complexity.

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Amy2015

Asif Kapadia's portrait of Amy Winehouse—a talented person whose self-destruction becomes public property. It shares Aunt Diane's reluctance to moralize about a complicated life, and its anger at the machinery that consumes people.

But The film has no counterargument to its own interpretation, and some find the archive footage approach emotionally manipulative.

Amy poster

The Accident2017

Both use a single tragedy as a lens to expose institutional denial, collective mythology-making, and the human cost of needing a death to mean something larger than itself.

A Czech documentary by David Ondřícek about the 1989 car crash that triggered the Velvet Revolution. A woman dies; her death becomes political property. Meditative, quietly furious, structurally similar to Garbus—a death that rewrites a nation's story.

But It's in Czech with subtitles, and operates in a completely different historical register. The pacing is glacial and interpretive rather than investigative.

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Killing Ground2017

Both insist on the most difficult question: how does an ordinary person become the author of catastrophe? Both resist the comfort of explaining it away.

Damien Power's Australian horror film about a family massacre in the outback. It shares Aunt Diane's DNA—fragmented narrative, unreliable perception, the horrifying recognition that violence emerges from ordinary people in ordinary moments. No monsters, just circumstances and choices.

But It's a brutal slasher film, not a documentary. The violence is graphic and deliberately disturbing rather than investigative.

Killing Ground poster

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