Desaparecida: El caso Lucie Blackman

There's been a sort of backlash against true crime sensationalism lately, to the sort of degree where there's been an intentional shift towards a focus on the victims of crime rather than the criminals or police. Though even that has gradually started to see this leading to exploitation.

This documentary goes a very odd route by seemingly avoiding the victim to a large degree. Lucie Blackman's disappearance is the driving force here, but from the very start we are essentially following the police and their investigation. We don't know who Lucie Blackman is, what she was doing before she disappeared, who she knew, anything that a typical documentary would, setting up the person, brief backstory, then their disappearance and then the investigation.

Instead we jump straight into the investigation. At the same time, focus is being given to Lucie's father who apparently has to harangue the police into actually investigating this as a crime.

Even from there there's not much actually going on in terms of a narrative here around Lucie Blackman. We're shown her father railing against the cops and their apparent ineptitude but we never actually see or hear how they are mishandling the case at first.

Once the cops start down the case, leads are picked up on and followed but we aren't very clear in terms of how said leads were picked up on and how they even relate to the Blackman case, possibly in large part because we skipped over the basic facts of the case and started the documentary with her already missing and without ever really looking back into the "who what where why how" of her actual disappearance.

This is a documentary, so it's supposed to be informative first, with the entertainment aspect being a sort of uncomfortable pushed-aside element that is implied but never made obvious.

Because of this, it's hard to review a documentary, since critiquing it for being boring or otherwise not entertaining is kind of missing the point and a lot like critiquing the news for constantly moving on to new topics of reporting and discussion.

As a result, my problem with this documentary isn't with the entertainment but with the information given. Namely, we aren't given a lot of information. As mentioned, they start off 3 days after the disappearance, and don't give us the starting facts that almost every missing persons case starts with. As well, when we're being told about certain things, we aren't actually shown enough information that would support what is being shown.

As an example, at one point we are told about a trial and the results of a trial. However we are not given any information as to why the result of the trial ended up how it went, particularly considering that we went along with the discovery of the key bits of evidence with the police. Why did this happen? Why did it fail? From just this documentary alone, we don't know.

Extremely biased story telling, eluding many important facts of the story, including the father receiving 450k£ from the killer to limit his sentence, or the existence of her friend and colleague who had received a phone call from the killer on day one.

Only the father and cops are giving testimonies to re-write History, and skip all the aspects that could hurt Japanese police.

When you check who the director is, you understand the story is told in a way to clean Tokyo police image only.

Netflix should be ashamed of producing such content, without any fact checking, and depicting an absolutely misleading representation of the actual story.

Go on YouTube or listen to podcasts, you will have better quality content to understand the full story instead of wasting your time with this piece of propaganda.

Has everything you'd want in a true crime documentary: a fascinating case, tons of archival footage, linear storytelling, very little (if any) re-enactments, a beautiful score and some stunning photography (Tokyo is a beautiful city). Not to mention interviews with the actual people involved. So many docs these days fail in at least one of these areas so it's nice to see one that does it all right for a change.

Obviously it's a sad case and a terrible situation for her family, so you can't fault her father for wanting answers. And that's another fascinating element to this case is the dynamic between her family (father, generally) and the Japanese police who handle things a bit differently than we're used to in the West.

Overall, one of the best true crime docs I've seen this year. Definitely recommend.

I know this story pretty well already, having read a few books on it. Tokyo Hostess, in particular, was well written and gave a lot of detail.

This documentary starts when Lucie has already disappeared, so there is no background to her life in Tokyo and her job working in the hostess club. It suffers greatly for this, as this is what would make the casual viewer care about her story.

Instead, it's her father, who I find seriously arrogant, who is star of this show. Not playing down that he lost his daughter, and obviously what happened to Lucie was evil, but I just couldn't deal with him throwing his weight around in another country. I know this won't be a popular opinion. Reading that he accepted a cash payment in hopes of a reduced sentence from a friend of the killer makes him look even worse, honestly.

Lucie took a silly risk to make easy money (again, in no way makes what happened to her okay). Father has the air of wealth, so not sure why he didn't just fund her holiday instead of letting her do that. Even a safe country has its issues.

This is obviously a tragic case, the anguish and desperation are perfectly understandable.

However, the attitude? Why do British nationals so often behave like this in an international setting? From British journalists throwing stereotypical comments about another culture, to Tim Blackman's initial disrespect and antagonistic attitude to random Japanese people/cops who are just trying to go about their lives. Again, it's a serious case, and it's understandable that certain standard behavior is out-of-the-window here, but trying to stick your posters anywhere then giving an officer a hard time for nicely telling him not to?

Imagine a foreigner who made a scene in London after their hostess daughter went missing. They then tried to stick posters everywhere downtown, then their entourage of journalists/friends throw stereotypical comments like "oh you know the Brits, they may seem reserved, but there's a dark side under the belly," sneering at the police instead of trying to engage with them first... they might be tackled to the ground forthwith, let alone being given big platforms to present their case to the media and being allowed to do whatever they want (including setting up a hotline, which the Tokyo Met claims might interfere with investigation), all the while with many locals offering assistance.

Look, not suggesting that the Tokyo Met is beyond reproach here, all police forces are flawed, including the Scotland Yard, and their actions deserve scrutiny. Just saying that a sense of self-entitlement isn't going to help anything.