Last night I watched Girl In The Picture (2022), directed by Skye Borgman, which is a new Netflix true crime documentary. I had heard it was good, and, with a runtime of less than two hours (rather than the six hour-long episode slog too many Netflix documentaries are), I decided to try it. It tells the story of a young woman who is killed in a hit and run, and how her death leads to the discovery of a whole trail of kidnappings, murder, and pedophilia.

It’s all down to one man, the perpetrator Franklin Delano Floyd, but the focus of the film is not on Floyd but his victims, particularly the titular girl in the picture. This is in keeping with the trend of true crime documentaries to take the focus off the criminal and onto the people affected by their crimes; in general, it’s not a trend I have a whole lot of interest in (I like reading/watching this stuff because of the focus on the wrong-doer, it’s like a mental vacation from correct behavior), but here it makes perfect sense and is logical enough because of the rather unusual circumstances of the case.

With the story being told, and the gradual unfolding nature of the facts, it would spoil things for me to say much more. I recommend this if you like the more mysterious end of true crime; though the acts are terrible, the film does not linger on them. Girl in the Picture is not exploitative, but an exercise in doing justice to the memory of someone who never even knew her real name.