American Murder - The Gabby Petito, the review: a true-crime with a dramatic true story
The three episodes of American Murder - The Gabby Petito Case tell the tragic disappearance of the American girl, passionate about travel and found lifeless in the summer of 2021. On Netflix.
On YouTube, the only video she published online on the platform is available, which following her tragic disappearance has obtained millions of views, with the posthumous success that gives much to think about this market of pain and death, which has long consumed not only public opinion at every latitude but also the users themselves.
It is not a spoiler, however, that the girl at the center of this series is dead, as The Gabby Petito Case is part of the American Murder franchise, a true crime project that retraces dramatic crime stories for the streaming public.
Here too we immediately discover how the tragedy at the center of this three-part report took place in the summer of 2021, for a total duration of just over two hours of viewing, give or take a minute. Two hours in which the viewer is accompanied by the morbid relationship between the future victim and her boyfriend Brian Christopher Laundrie.
American Murder - The Gabby Petito: in search of the truth
The first episode broadly introduces the story and its nefarious key passages, offering a long series of interviews with friends and relatives, not only of Gabby but also of the person who claimed to love her: while his parents are completely absent, as we will also see in the future, ambiguous, developments, her best friend intervenes, deeply shaken by what happened.
And then the divorced parents of the young woman with their respective new partners, to tell how the relationship between the two boys was at the very least problematic and a harbinger of worries.
Of course, no one could have expected such consequences, starting with the police officers themselves who stopped the couple following a furious argument while they were on board the white van in which they were touring the States: a carelessness that perhaps gave a decisive turn to what happened only a few days later.
A linear development?
In these operations, the important thing is to try to keep the curiosity of those who watch high, while at the same time ensuring respect for those who were directly involved. If this, albeit with due proportions, is given by the presence of people close to the victim, the same cannot be said for the approach to the story, which could have easily been exhausted in the space of a long episode lasting an hour or perhaps even less.
Many situations are in fact re-proposed from different angles and points of view, with new interviews and alleged twists kept warm for the third and final part, where the circle around the case and the related controversies that followed is finally closed, with a casus belli generated by the different resonance given to the missing white girls compared to similar cases involving black peers.
The video story of a tragedy
And of course, there is no shortage of videos made by the actual protagonists. Gabby and Brian were in fact almost always on the road, behind the wheel of their white van, making videos for their vlog, with which they hoped to monetize their passion. A sort of bitter and paradoxical testament, which over time shows the transformation of an apparently united couple into something else, much more disturbing.
Even the choice to display superimposed writings that cite the messages sent by one or the other to those of interest to them is a sort of umpteenth intrusion into the intimacy of a drama that - it must be said - her own family agreed to make public.
What remains at the end of American Murder - The Gabby Petito Case is the bitterness for a death that perhaps could have been avoided and at the same time a look at American society, colder than critical, opening up more doubts than certainties.