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Netflix viewers have been left ‘disturbed’ by a harrowing true crime documentary.
The streaming giant is known for its hugely successful original shows such as Wednesday, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and Stranger Things.
It’s also famous for its true crime documentaries, including Girl in the Picture and Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes.
More recently, Lover Stalker Killer has left fans creeped out – and vowing to never sign up to dating sites as a result.
Now viewers are raving about its latest offering – which is leaving a lasting impression on viewers.
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The film in question is a documentary that came out in 2012 but has recently found new life on Netflix.
It tells the harrowing true story of a 13-year-old boy named Nicholas Barclay, who disappeared in Texas while playing football in 1994.
The police presumed that the young boy had been murdered or kidnapped despite a body never being found.
Yet in 1997, Barclay’s family was alerted that he had been ‘found’ in Spain. However, things were not as they seemed.
While Barclay had blonde hair and blue eyes, the boy who arrived at their home had brown eyes, dyed hair, and spoke with a French accent.
Despite these obvious and drastic changes, he was welcomed home by his family, who were just happy to have found their missing son.
However, it was later revealed that the boy was not Barclay but in fact a 23-year-old con artist named Frédéric Bourdin, who had committed similar crimes in France and Spain.
The movie sees the Barclay family recall their side of the story, while Bourdin also shares his own experience.
Since viewers discovered the documentary on Netflix, they have taken to social media to discuss the unbelievable true story.
One person shares: “Netflix adding this today, it’s genuinely one of the greatest and most jaw-dropping docs I’ve ever seen. Well worth a watch.”
Another viewer adds: “I watched this and was completely disturbed. This movie gave me chills.”
“Just watched on Netflix… madness,” comments a third.
Someone else says: “Just watched and honestly, wtf was that.”
A fifth user adds: “Stranger than fiction is an understatement.”
A Google Review goes even further, penning: “This story blows my mind This was super intriguing. It’s a documentary with more plot twists I love documentaries that have a little mystery to them. This is one of them. I loved that they didn’t completely adhere to the documentary formula, the recreated scenes added a lot to the documentary. I was convinced that family knew more than they were willing to admit.”
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On Rotten Tomatoes, the documentary has a 95% rating, so it is certainly popular among critics too.
Lisa Bernard writes in her review: “This is edge-of-your-seat stuff and the difficulty is in the telling of the tale. To give any of this film away is a crime. You simply have to see it for yourself.”
Speaking to Filmmaker Magazine about the movie, director Bart Layton explained how he came to the crazy story.
He shares: “In 2009 I happened upon an article in a Spanish magazine about Frédéric Bourdin, AKA Le Chaméléon – a Frenchman who had travelled the length and breadth of Europe passing himself off as an abandoned child. A quick Internet trawl threw up dozens of similar articles about him including a long piece from the New Yorker that described his time in Texas.
“The story was incredibly hard to believe – a twenty-three-year-old French-Algerian man successfully steals the identity of a missing Texan child and begins a new life within the family posing as their son? I knew that this would make an incredible film but wondered if perhaps this wasn’t the whole story but was perhaps a way into a more interesting film about deception and, in particular, self-deception.”
He further explains to Complex that: “That is the extraordinary bit of it, that it really happened in the real world. Actually, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising, but there have been a few funny incidents at Q&A’s, after screenings.
“One guy, at either Sundance or SXSW, put his hand up at the end of the screening and asked, ‘I’d like to know if this is based on a true story.’ He thought the whole thing was fiction, and that the people in the interviews were actors.”
The film in question is called The Imposter – and is available to stream now on Netflix.
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