Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ted K’ on Hulu, an Unconventional Biopic in Which Sharlto Copley Chillingly Embodies the Unabomber

Now on Hulu, Ted K casts Sharlto Copley as Ted “The Unabomber” Kaczynski, which is kind of a stroke of deranged genius. Copley is known for playing screw-loose types in stuff like The A-Team, District 9 and, uh, Chappie, so tackling the Unabomber seems to be in his wheelhouse, but also an opportunity to stretch himself creatively (it’s by far his most “serious” role). Filmmaker Tony Stone keeps his focus on Copley’s fully committed portrayal of the notorious Montana man who killed three and injured many more with letter bombs between 1978 and 1995, and doesn’t seem interested in making a typical biopic.

TED K: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Ominous scrolling text reveals that the film was shot on the very land where Kaczynski lived, and the story is culled from his own words (presumably from the 40,000 pages of journals found among his belongings). Next, snowmobilers. They tear through the Montana woods. Noisily. Ted (Copley) hates it. He spies on them as they zoom and roar and pollute. We next see Ted taking an ax to the wall of a luxury cabin. He randomly smashes things as he walks through the home, finds the garage housing the snowmobiles, and axes the hell out of them. Ted’s been living in the mountains without running water or electricity for years, killing rabbits for dinner, listening to classical music on the radio, obsessively journaling, cursing at airplanes passing loudly overhead and occasionally firing bullets at helicopters, fruitlessly. All he wants is peace and quiet.

Ted is a math whiz (with a Ph.D) who became an ecology extremist, Luddite and consummate loner. He’s funny when he’s a disgruntled type-a-letter-to-the-editor guy, less so when he decides he wants to kill people he perceives as ruining the beauty of the natural environment, ranting from airline CEOs to computer salesmen. He calls his mother on the payphone to beg for money and verbally spar with her, and he deviates into psychochatter about how he’s never had sex with a woman, which is something she doesn’t want to hear about. Perhaps Ted is the blueprint for the modern incel, a pre-internet doomed virgin who inspired countless Twitter trolls? I speculate.

What makes Ted’s moral compass go wonky? Hard to tell. Being his own company for so long, perhaps. Sometimes he bicycles into town to visit the library, or mop up the diner or work at the local lumber mill for a payday. Some people know him as the weirdo way out there in the cabin, nice enough, polite, quiet, mostly keeps to himself. He’s quite the misogynist if you get too close, however. News of the Exxon oil spill enrages him. Utility workers erecting power lines and poles enrages him. A woman running the show at the mill enrages him. So he starts building bombs, experimenting with them until they progress from flimsy firecrackers to lethal weapons. He ventures into San Francisco, shaves his beard, cuts his hair, seals the bombs in packages and drops them in mailboxes. He writes his manifesto, and we hear portions of it in voiceover as he stokes a fire to heat water for a makeshift shower. The industrial revolution ruined humanity, he says, as warm water rushes out of a bucket with holes in it, and we watch him wash his ass.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Ted K is Into the Wild crossed with Taxi Driver crossed with Joker crossed with Capone.

Performance Worth Watching: Copley’s performance is pretty much it for the whole two hours, so be thankful it’s very much worth watching.

Memorable Dialogue: After jet planes fly overhead and startle him with a sonic boom, we hear Ted’s voice via his journal: “It reduced me to tears of impotent rage. But I have a plan for revenge.”

Sex and Skin: Ted has never had sex. But Ted does wash his ass.

Our Take: Ted K is equal parts chilling and obscure. Chilling, because we spend so much time with and get so close to someone whose core values stand in stark contrast to his disregard for the value of human life; we’re drawn into his sphere by his admirable concern for preserving the environment, but there are obvious sympathetic lines we can’t cross, and that’s a cold, cold feeling. And obscure, because we get no scenes of Ted as a child or student or anything within most of our familiar societal settings; we’re dropped into his isolated existence and there we stay until he slowly, excruciatingly ventures into madness, not of the foaming-and-frenzied variety, but a silent blazing flame of hatred deep within him.

Notably, Stone only diverts from Ted’s point of view to show us his bombs exploding and shredding buildings and people, although not in too much gory detail. Otherwise, we hang with Copley and his highly distinctive misery, which Copley wordlessly curdles into derangement. It’s a fascinatingly committed, convincing performance, even when it ventures into cryptic territory we’ll never understand. Stone is not at all concerned about the timeline here; the narrative makes jagged leaps forward with the occasional cue (e.g., a news report of the 1989 Exxon disaster), but the goal appears to be disorientation, to make us better understand the guy’s substantial societal disconnect.

We are privy to bizarre inner monologues and hallucinations, with recurring appearances of a fantasy woman Ted never has and never will be able to touch; a surreal waking-dream sequence at the dead-midpoint of the film has Ted scrambling from his bed as the cabin tumbles over, forcing him out the window, while Bobby Vinton’s ‘Mr. Lonely’ plays, somehow with both on-the-nose sincerity and winking irony, on the soundtrack. Such odd creative flourishes, and a tone veering from doom-ridden to darkly comic, differentiate Ted K from most biopics.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Ted K is by no means an easy or enjoyable watch. But oddly compelling, hypnotic and provocative? For sure. It’s definitely not for everyone, though.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream Ted K on Hulu