Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Can I Tell You A Secret?’ On Netflix, A Docuseries About Women Being Stalked Online By A Persistent Stranger

Can I Tell You A Secret?, a two-part docuseries directed by Liza Williams and Tash Gaunt, examines a case where three British women, all young and heavy social media users, were stalked online by a stranger posing as various accounts, using the names of both people the women know and complete strangers to threaten and harass them. Every time they tried to block or ignore the messages, they became more threatening and spread among numerous accounts.

CAN I TELL YOU A SECRET?: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A night shot along a barely-lit street, with a disguised, menacing voice talking in the background.

The Gist: The women who were stalked, Abby, Zoe and Lia, are all interviewed extensively for the docuseries and participate in reenactments, most of them consisting of them looking at their phones. That’s where most of the harassment happened, starting with someone sliding into their DMs on Instagram and claiming to know them. Then they ask “Can I tell you a secret?” The harassment then progresses to other social platforms as well as texts and WhatsApp messages.

The messages seem strange, and as Abby mentions, they seem like they’re coming from a particular IG account. But further investigation shows that the account sending the DMs had been hacked. As things progress, the women find that not only are they getting harassed by various hacked social accounts, but someone posing as them is contacting people they know.

In one example, Abby describes doing a sexy photo shoot where the photographer promised that she’d be the only one that could distribute the photos. But when her torturer shows that the photos are now online, she finds out from the photographer that someone posing as her asked him for the photos and he sent them to that person.

Police in the various towns where the women live take their cases, but don’t seem to apply any urgency to their investigations, given the fact that the women aren’t being physically threatened. But that doesn’t mean that the three of them don’t become extremely paranoid or lose relationships due to the activity of this very persistent stalker.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Can I Tell You A Secret? has a similar vibe as Lover, Stalker, Killer, but not with quite the same degree of physical harm involved.

Our Take: Something in the story of Can I Tell You A Secret? felt missing, but we couldn’t put our finger on it as we watched. Later, we realized what it was: A physical threat. We don’t want to dismiss what the three women interviewed in the series, as well as the other victims of the cyberstalker, went through; we’d likely become a paranoid mess if someone sent us a blizzard of creepy, semi-threatening DMs and messages and wouldn’t stop. But, since all of the story basically happens online, there isn’t a whole lot of visual momentum to the story.

Williams and Gaunt try to make up for it by giving the cyberstalker creepy voices as the texts are read aloud, and showing dashes of light going over overhead wires, as if the messages were traveling that way, among other visual effects. But we couldn’t help but feel that the foreboding that they were trying to convey was set at a low level, with a story that doesn’t really build to a crescendo of danger (see the aforementioned Lover, Stalker, Killer to see what we mean by that).

The temptation is to see these women as unfortunate victims of a society that likes to be extremely online. But it quickly becomes apparent that, even if their online lives made them targets, the harassment they experienced was perpetrated by someone who knew how to get around the common ways people might try to shut off online creepers. Despite the lack of physical threat, the weight of the harassment on these women was palpable, and it’s the main factor that kept us watching.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Zoe pursues a name from a message forwarded to her by an ex, and sees that the person isn’t connected to her, and that “Matthew Hardy” has already been accused of hacking into Facebook accounts. Then the first episode ends with statements from the various police departments that didn’t seem to treat the women’s cases with any urgency.

Sleeper Star: All three women coming forward to tell their stories should be applauded, especially because it seems that they managed to find the person harassing them.

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite the lack of a story that feels tangible, Can I Tell You A Secret? illustrates that anyone can get stalked online, and that there are real consequences for the victims, even if they aren’t physical.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.