Television series

Wormwood

Name: Wormwood
Genre: Documentary, Drama, Crime
Released: 2017
Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, Molly Parker, Tim Blake Nelson, Michael Chernus, Jack Doke

Errol Morris turns the death of Frank Olson — an Army chemist who fell from a hotel window twenty-two years into a haunted search for the truth by his son — into something genuinely strange: interviews, archival footage, and full dramatic re-enactments collide across six hour-long episodes. It's obsessive, repetitive by design, and never lets you land on a comfortable answer. Watch it for the process of not knowing, not for a tidy solution.

TVMaze rating

5.9

If you liked this

The Fog of War2003

Morris's own Oscar-winning interview with Robert McNamara is the purest version of his method — one man, one camera, decades of buried guilt surfacing in real time.

But It's a single long interview. If Wormwood's dramatizations were the fun part for you, this offers none of that.

Icarus2017

A documentary that starts as a personal doping experiment and mutates into a genuine state-conspiracy thriller, with the same queasy feeling of history rearranging itself as you watch.

But Its scope balloons late and the pivot can feel like a different film bolted onto the first half.

Chernobyl2019

A government cover-up dramatized with total conviction, tracing exactly how institutional secrecy metastasizes when the truth becomes politically unacceptable.

But It's a conventional dramatic miniseries, not a documentary — you lose Morris's interrogation-of-memory structure entirely.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Manchurian Candidate1962

It's the fictional shadow of the exact program Wormwood investigates as fact — watch it knowing the government really was trying to do this, at the same moment audiences thought it was paranoid fantasy.

A Cold War thriller about a soldier brainwashed into an assassin, made and released while MK-Ultra was actually running — pure paranoid fiction that turned out to be barely exaggerated.

But Its Red Scare politics and 1960s pacing will feel like a period piece rather than a thriller.

American Crime Story2016

A true story told through fractured, non-chronological dramatization, circling its central death from multiple angles rather than marching straight through it.

But More soapy and character-driven than investigative — it's interested in people, not institutional cover-up.

Three Days of the Condor1975

Peak 1970s paranoia cinema: a low-level analyst discovers his own agency wants him dead, shot with the jittery dread of an era that no longer trusted its government.

But It's a straight thriller with a hero and an ending — none of Wormwood's deliberate unresolved ambiguity.

All the President's Men1976

The gold standard for watching an investigation unfold procedurally, phone call by phone call, document by document, toward a truth the powerful would rather stayed buried.

But It's calm and methodical where Wormwood is fractured and anguished — very different emotional temperatures.

MINDHUNTER2017

Same late-Cold-War institutional unease, same interest in what secretive government programs do to the people who run and are run through them.

But Its focus is criminal psychology, not political conspiracy — a tangential mood match rather than a direct one.

The Ipcress File1965

A vintage spy thriller built around brainwashing and identity control, with the same clammy suspicion that your own side might be the danger.

But Dated pacing and gadgetry will feel quaint next to Wormwood's modern, restless editing style.

The Act of Killing2012

Documentary subjects re-enact their own historical atrocities on camera, blurring confession and performance in a way that makes Wormwood's hybrid form look almost restrained by comparison.

But It is far more disturbing and morally unresolved — not a comfortable watch under any circumstances.

Cougar Town2009no page yet

Same structure as Wormwood — an obsessive amateur investigator chasing a death that officialdom would prefer stayed a suicide — but told entirely through voice, with no re-enactment at all.

A true-crime podcast that starts as a murder investigation and spirals into something stranger and sadder — obsession, small-town secrets, a death that never resolves the way you expect.

But It's audio only, seven hours long, and deliberately withholds the closure a true-crime story usually promises.

Get Out2017

Trade the historical MK-Ultra file for a modern nightmare and you get the same core horror Wormwood circles — the terror of your own mind being taken from you by an institution that insists it's for your own good.

A horror film about having your mind and body colonized by someone else's will, disguised as a meet-the-parents comedy until it very much isn't.

But It's genre horror with jump scares and a body-count climax — tonally about as far from a somber documentary as it gets.