UNITED STATES
Junkee
by MEG WATSON 9 JUNE 2017
If Netflix had a category labelled Trauma – and it surely can’t be far away – The Keepers would be a Top Pick. There’s never been any secret that this, a show about a murdered nun, was full of tragedy. But the sheer scope and depth of that hurt has taken many by surprise.
This is a show primarily about a 26-year-old woman who was abducted and murdered; her head caved in and body left to rot, infested with maggots. The first episode then tells us of a second woman, abducted, killed, and largely forgotten; and their two families who are without answers. This is, ostensibly, our mystery.
But The Keepers, as we go on to learn in six more gut-wrenching instalments, is also a story of rape and assault and psychological torment; of institutional abuse, and men who were given powers to act like gods. It’s a story of women (it is almost exclusively women) who were manipulated and silenced and defeated, by threat or circumstance. The series lets us get to know these survivors, and tracks their pains as it collides with the monolithic structures of the Catholic Church and police.
The tragedy of The Keepers isn’t just in a dead nun and those she left behind. The tragedy is that the documentary barely has a starting point to go off, and often doesn’t know exactly what it’s looking at. How do you hunt for a killer – let alone feel any thrill in the chase – when you’re watching everyone wash someone’s blood off their hands?
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