The ‘Casting JonBenet’ Trailer Is As Inventive As It Is Creepy

At this point, the mystery surrounding the murder of JonBenet Ramsey has been covered so many different times in so many different ways, that a straightforward documentary exploring the unsolved crime would be a snooze. So for her documentary Casting JonBenet, director Kitty Green went in a slightly different direction. As you’ll gather from the movie’s new trailer, Casting JonBenet examines the mysteries swirling around the 1996 crime through the lens of the townspeople of Boulder, Colorado, where Ramsey, then a 6-year-old beauty pageant queen, was found dead in the basement of her parents’ home.

Green and her team traveled to Boulder and began holding auditions for the town’s residents to play different characters in the Ramsey saga, including her parents, her younger brother, and even a mall Santa Claus, all of whom were at one point suspects in her murder. In the unnerving trailer, you’ll see regular people parsing through the now infamous details of the crime while also performing aspects of it. The best, and most chilling, example of this is when a woman says, “There’s no way a nine-year-old could pull off a murder like this,” as we cut to a young boy bashing in a watermelon with a blunt object. Casting JonBenet debuted to unanimous raves at the Sundance Film Festival and will premiere on April 28 where else, but on Netflix. Check out the trailer below.