Among its many controversial elements, Netflix’s true-crime documentary Don’t Fk With Cats ends by blaming the audience for Luka Magnotta’s crimes. In a month where Netflix dropped the first season of The Witcher and The Two Popes, one of its hottest Oscar season titles, it speaks volumes that arguably the most talked-about original on the streaming service this Christmastime has been Don’t Fk With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer. The three-part docuseries takes on the deeply controversial story of Luka Magnotta, a Canadian murderer who gained worldwide notoriety after posting a series of videos of himself online torturing and murdering kittens. Magnotta, who is currently serving a life sentence for the murder of Lin Jun, captured the attention of the internet with these videos and became the target of online sleuths who dedicated their time to unmasking the anonymous animal killer who taunted them with his deeds.
The crimes of Luka Magnotta saw him jailed for first-degree murder, among other charges. He also sent parts of his victim’s body to the national headquarters of the Conservative and Liberal Parties of Canada. As the murder of Lin Jun, an international student from China, led to a worldwide manhunt for Magnotta, his case became headline news across the planet. For amateur detectives and the mainstream media as a whole, Magnotta became a conduit for a new age of true crime, a representation for the intersections of fame, violence, and the internet.
He deliberately sought out the attention of others, be it positive or negative, and craved the spotlight at any cost. It made him equal parts compelling and repellent to discuss and to watch, including as the main subject of Don’t Fk With Cats. It’s not hard to see why the filmmakers would want to dissect this story, especially with how it pertains to the rise of online investigators taking on the weight of responsibility typically given to law enforcement officials. The problem with Don’t Fk With Cats, however, is that it wants to lay the blame for Luka Magnotta’s sickening crimes closer to home for the audience.
Why Does Don’t F**k With Cats Blame The Audience?
For the majority of the three hours or so of its running time, the audience spends its time with two of the online detectives who became unofficial heads of the Magnotta kitten killer investigation: Deanna Thompson, known by the alias Baudi Moovan (a reference to a song by the Beastie Boys), and John Green (a pseudonym to protect his privacy). A large chunk of the first episode, before Magnotta’s name is ever mentioned, is spent with this pair as they document the ways they tried to find the mysterious kitten killer. We hear about the extreme lengths they went to for this task, including a time when their slapdash group of detectives accused the wrong man of being the cat killer.
For most of this period, the docuseries is an interesting study into how the advancement of the internet has made true crime an issue of more blurred lines between reality and hobby in fascinating and potentially dangerous ways. When the docuseries reaches its climax, Green and Thompson both wonder aloud about whether the attention they paid to Magnotta only spurred him on further to commit ever-more despicable misdeeds. Thompson then turns to the camera and tries to pin the blame on the viewer for participating in this voyeuristic spectacle with no care or consideration for the human cost involved.
Don’t Fk With Cats seems to be borrowing from the handbook of Michael Haneke, whose highly controversial drama Funny Games features two sadistic criminals who frequently turn to the camera and goad the audience for still watching as they commit more violent and sadistic crimes against the movie’s central family. It was condescending when Haneke did it and it’s not much better in Don’t Fk With Cats. It’s a climax that aims for grandeur and penetrating deep thought but lands on portentous and smug instead.
The problem with this attitude is that it overlooks so much of the tangled context surrounding Magnotta. Even if he did want to goad people into action, he still killed animals to do so and it was a worthy pursuit to want to uncover him given that what he did was illegal and the official authorities are notoriously archaic in their responses to online crimes. Ultimately, the main issue with this approach is that the series wants to have its cake and eat it: It wants to create a compelling narrative to encourage audiences to watch it for three hours, then it wants to punish them for being sucked in by their tactics. Given that some of those tactics involved extensive use of the videos Magnotta made showing his violent crimes, that’s certainly a bold stance for the show to take. There are certainly ethical and creative quandaries to dissect in trying to create cinematic drama around something so very real and horrifying but Don’t F**k With Cats doesn’t want to get that complicated. Its ending was, in that respect, the easy way out and the wrong direction to take.
