What is it about true crime that catches our attention? Whether its documentaries or cinematised retellings, no one skips crime shows. Netflix’s latest offering Don’t F*** With Cats is the cherry on the topping of the gamut of crime shows in the platform’s repository. The show through its depiction of events lays to us a very important question: what part do we all play in what serial killers are looking for—fame, notoriety, infamy? The limited docu-series indicts us all.
But the problem is that it does so without looking at itself and how it falls for the same, frankly grotesque, traps that all true crime seems to do. In three parts, the story of the Canadian murderer Luka Magnotta comes forward. Internet geeks Baudi Moovan (Deanna Thompson) and John Green recount everything that lead up to Luka’s arrest. Before Luka was a murderer, he was an animal abuser. Back in 2010, a mystery man uploaded a video onto YouTube titled ‘1 boy 2 kittens’. The video featured a male in a hooded jacket, vacuum sealing two kittens until they suffocated and died.
The clip sparked outrage online and led to Baudi and John creating the ‘Find the Kitten Vacuumer… for Great Justice’ Facebook group where a gang of internet sleuths try to pin down the vacuumer who we discover is Luka Magnotta. His alleged crimes start with cat killing and move on to the death of a man named Jun Lin. The sleuths discuss every detail from the language spoken in the video to the make of the vaccum cleaner used to find out the location of the online cat killer. Much of the documentary focuses on two internet sleuths, Baudi John, who tried to track the ID of the online cat killer before witnessing the human crime online.
They liaison with police in various countries and use every internet tool at their disposal to find clues to the killer’s identity. The game of cat and mouse gets dangerous for internet users during the course of their research as well. Baudi starts receiving death threats. Unlike other crime shows which form a sort of entertainment Don’t F*** With Cats holds a mirror to the viewers. How much information are we sharing online? Are we feeding into the minds of criminals and mentally disturbed with our fascination for the bizarre? In the end when Baudi Moovan, who helps to track down the murderer, looks straight down the barrel of the camera and calls us all out for watching, you feel like switching off the computer and turning off the phone and disappearing from all social media platforms.