Ted K Review: Tony Stone’s Fly-on-the-Wall Look at Unabomber Ted Kaczynski

Noise. That’s what gives the first impression in Tony Stone’s Ted K. Featuring a score by industrial musician Blanck Mass, the film blends groaning synth tones with the overwhelming sounds of jets flying overhead and logging equipment sawing down trees in the remote Montana location where Stone’s follow-up to Peter and the Farm is set.

The film’s heightened soundscape is representative of the roiling obsessions of Ted Kaczynski (Sharlto Copley), the math professor turned Luddite bomber who moved to this region in 1971 in order to seek refuge from modern society. Similarly, Nathan Corbin and Ethan Palmer’s camera, defined by unnaturally precise push-ins and circular tracking motions, suggests an extension of the sleek engine of modern technology that so repulsed the man. In the world of Ted K, the presence of an electronics store is as unnerving as a haunted Gothic castle.

For as long as climate change continues to wreak global havoc, Kaczynski will continue to draw admirers, but Ted K doesn’t seek to invite our sympathy for the man. Well before we see Ted engage in his bombing campaign, the film establishes him as a bloviating misogynist who openly disrespects women. As such, there’s more than a bit of irony to the moment where he calls his mother and demands that she send him money since he cannot hold down a job.

Ted’s interactions with others are at best uncomfortable and at worst needlessly hostile. Copley gives the most underplayed performance of his career as Kaczynski, who speaks in clipped, precise bursts around others so as make every conversation as short as possible, before then settling into a stasis when by himself. The man’s bombing campaigns are no less thoughtfully depicted, as Stone is largely unconcerned with the events leading up to Kaczynski mailing his letter bombs, and the filmmaker cuts around the moments of their detonation.

Stone’s avoidance of emotional manipulation in dramatizing Kaczynski’s terror campaign is admirable, and comparable to how Jean-Luc Godard stripped his war film Les Carabiniers of the usual tropes that make even ostensibly anti-war movies so exciting. But where Godard also deconstructed the entire visual language of his chosen genre, Stone uncritically indulges the visual trademarks of psychological drama, especially in Ted K’s second half.

In the absence of diving into the depths of Kaczynski’s environmental views and thus running the risk of allowing viewers to align themselves with them, Ted K eventually settles into a generic portrait of a madman. Woozy, distorted close-ups of Ted’s face abound as he spirals further out of control, and Copley abandons the restraint that he showed earlier in the film as he leans into the signifiers of mental illness across scenes in which Ted is seen screaming, stammering, and giddily laughing. Refusing to take Kaczynski’s manifesto and philosophy seriously is one thing, but it’s another to turn him into a run-of-the-mill freak.

At the margins of this empty spectacle, though, are subtler illustrations of Kaczyinski’s mindset. Ted listens to Vivaldi and other classical composers on his portable radio throughout the film, establishing a link between his conservative cultural tastes and his reactionary ecoterrorism. It’s a holistic and anti-romanticizing glimpse into the man’s worldview that proves to be far more meaningful than the grotesque images of Copley drifting around his property with a deranged grin on his face as reports of his actions play on the news.