In 2018, an emaciated male body was found in the Florida wilderness. Blood work showed that he was healthy, with no drugs in his system beyond Tylenol. Among his belongings were food and money, but no phone. The man had been hiking the Appalachian Trail. Several hikers recalled encountering him within the eight months before his death — he was handsome — but they only knew him by his trail name, Mostly Harmless.
Mostly Harmless did not want to be found.
Directed by Patricia E. Gillespie, the Max true-crime documentary “They Called Him Mostly Harmless” is, on one level, about the quest to identify the body. Hikers, a detective, and the Wired journalist who wrote the articles that inspired the documentary, feature as talking heads.
But the other, arguably more unsettling, half of the story centers on the amateur detectives who helped crack the case — all middle-age women involved in a Facebook group dedicated to the cause.
This artless documentary, composed primarily of interviews and B-roll footage (of walks along the trail from a first-person perspective; the amateur detectives looking at their computers, brows furrowed), mechanically pieces together the mystery. It’s a film for those who don’t know the outcome, playing upon the viewers’ thirst for answers as it chips away at a clearer portrait of the man.
More interesting is the film’s meta-true-crime dimension, which links the case’s obsessive amateurs to a broader fascination with the genre and its fraught form of escapism. Dead ends and false leads aggravate the digital sleuthing hive (a cancer survivor testifies to the online harassment he faced after being falsely identified as Mostly Harmless), and petty rivalries ensue between the Facebook group’s leaders. The documentary doesn’t treat them with outright mockery, but the tone is mildly condescending — a feeling heightened by an outcome that points to the futility of it all.
They Called Him Mostly Harmless
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Max.
