'CHAOS' is an underwhelming Netflix documentary about the Manson Murders

Errol Morris puts out another underwhelming film, in adapting Tom O’Neill’s acclaimed book that questioned longstanding narratives.

I remember when he made the interview rounds for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, his 2019 film that touched on a, shall we say, fictionalized version of the Manson murders, Quentin Tarantino called Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring’s “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties” the best book anyone had written about the Manson case.

That inspired me to read O’Neill’s book, which began as a magazine assignment for Premiere magazine and encompassed 20 years of reporting, a project that outlasted that magazine by well over a decade.

I remembered being impressed by the book, although I had two big takeaways. The first was that O’Neill pretty convincingly argued that Vincent Bugliosi’s “Helter Skelter” theory about the case, argued in court, in Bugliosi’s book, and elsewhere over the decades, was wrong.

The second was an extremely circumstantial case about supposed CIA involvement with Manson and how MK Ultra may have had something to do with how Manson got control over his subjects, which the book didn’t come close to proving. The book often felt like O’Neill decided that 20 years was enough and published what he had.

In retrospect, Bugliosi’s whole idea that Manson, inspired by everything from the Book of Revelation to the Beatles song “Helter Skelter,” ordered the killings to start a race war that would result in the Black side of the war making Manson himself their leader never made a great deal of sense.

Now, we have a documentary adaptation directed by a true master documentarian, Errol Morris. And the film, titled CHAOS: The Manson Murders, is a huge disappointment, probably the biggest letdown of any nonfiction film so far this year.

Long movies are often made from short stories, this is the opposite- a short documentary made from a long book. The book’s 500 pages are whittled down to just 90 minutes, which barely scratches the surface of the Manson case and its many complications.

Morris puts O’Neill himself into the famous Interrotron, and we also hear from some talking heads who argue that the book’s thesis is completely wrong. But the best thing about the book was that it was so dense and played with so many ideas. The movie does neither.

Honestly, while I often argue that a docuseries could have easily been a feature documentary, the Manson case is expansive enough that it probably could have gone on for multiple parts and hours. After all, there’s nothing Netflix loves more than to devote a few hours to a super-prominent true crime case from decades past.

This is a new take on Canonical Boomer History, in much the same way A Complete Unknown was- a re-examination of a story that just about everyone in my parents’ generation knows all about. It’s not really a “conspiracy theory,” like the sort of stuff that can be found on Netflix every day, mostly because it doesn’t actually reach any conclusions about what the theory even is.

CHAOS, and his last couple of projects honestly make me wonder whether Morris, a legend of nonfiction filmmaking now in his late 70s, has still got it.