Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
When Lonnie Franklin Jr. was arrested in South Central Los Angeles in 2010 as the suspected murderer of a string of young black women, police hailed it as the culmination of 20 years of investigations. Four years later documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield took his camera to the alleged killer’s neighborhood for another view.
Nick Broomfield's documentary stands out for its unflinching community-level perspective on the Grim Sleeper case, centering the voices of South Central residents—particularly women—who were systematically ignored by law enforcement for decades. The investigative narrative is genuinely revelatory, exposing systemic racism and institutional failure with unusual moral urgency. Broomfield's guerrilla intimacy gives it a raw, distinctive voice that sets it apart from standard true-crime fare. However, the ending feels unresolved and somewhat deflating, hampered by the ongoing legal proceedings at the time of filming, leaving the documentary without a satisfying structural conclusion. Cinematography is functional but unremarkable for the genre.