Andrew Jarecki’s six-part documentary is superbly cut and hard to stop watching, and it is uncomfortable to enjoy. Robert Durst talks and the editors let him; only the slow-motion reenactments and a swelling score stand between it and something remarkable.
Andrew Jarecki had already made a feature about Robert Durst, All Good Things (2010), when Durst rang him and offered to talk. That phone call is the foundation of The Jinx: six episodes, first shown on 8 February 2015, built around some 20 hours of interviews with the heir to a New York property fortune about the three deaths that have followed him for thirty years. It is superbly made, and it is uncomfortable to have enjoyed as much as we did. Both of those come from the same source, which is Durst himself.
David Paul Jacobson and Marc Smerling shoot him close, in a dark room, with nothing behind him to look at but his own face. He blinks a great deal. He answers questions no lawyer would let him answer, about the body he cut up in Galveston, Texas, in 2001, in a flat, reasonable voice, as if describing a difficult afternoon at the tip. Zac Stuart-Pontier, who created the series with Jarecki and Smerling and is one of its seven credited editors, holds the shot after each answer is finished, and those held seconds are where the programme lives. We spent them leaning forward.
The structure is three cases in turn: the disappearance of Durst’s wife Kathleen Durst in 1982, the shooting of his friend Susan Berman in Los Angeles in 2000, and the killing in Galveston. Around the interview the editors lay archive, court tape, local news and the people who were there. Jeanine Pirro, the prosecutor who reopened the Kathleen case, is sharp and plainly enjoys the camera. Cody Cazalas, the Galveston detective, is the opposite, a man who says what he found and stops. Charles Bagli, the New York Times reporter who has covered Durst for years, supplies the family history.
It is Kathleen’s friends who keep the series honest. Gilberte Najamy and Ellen Strauss talk about her as a person rather than a case, and Najamy’s anger has not softened in three decades. It moved us more than we expected; for a few minutes the programme is about a young woman who was training to be a doctor and not about the odd man who married her. Those minutes are rare, and the series knows it, and it goes back to him.
What does not work is everything that tries to make this look like a thriller. The reenactments are shot in slow motion with the colour drained out: a car on a wet road, bin bags in dark water, a woman’s back walking away. West Dylan Thordson’s score, strings over a low pulse, swells under them every time, and under a good deal else. None of it is needed. The facts are strange enough on their own, and each time the series dresses them up we were reminded that somebody was deciding how a real death should look.
The larger discomfort is Durst. He is odd, dry and now and then funny, and by episode four we realised we were enjoying his company. Then he would describe something involving a saw and we would remember what we were enjoying. The series is built to produce exactly that lurch and it produces it well, but a programme that puts its subject this close for this long is making a bargain with him, and the people he is accused of harming are on screen for a fraction of his time. Jarecki and Smerling appear as themselves, on the telephone and in edit suites, and by the last two episodes the series has quietly become about their pursuit of him. That is gripping. It is also a change of subject.
Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans (2003) set two accounts of a crime against each other and refused to choose. The Jinx chooses, and it chooses with the tools of drama rather than of evidence. That is why it is hard to stop watching. It is also why you should keep your judgement about you while you do. The final minutes of episode six we will not describe, and you should not let anyone describe them to you either.
A second run of six episodes, Part Two, followed on 21 April 2024. Watch the first six one a night, with someone to argue with, and keep the light on for the last one.
