‘A Toxic Love Story’ Review: True Crime Doc Keeps the Twists Coming
What at first seems like another “crazy lady” movie builds to something more insidious and damning.
Watching A Toxic Love Story, Alexandra Lacey’s new true crime documentary for Netflix, I started to worry about its resemblance to Maternal Instinct. Released a little over a month ago, Maternal Instinct explored the lengths a woman would go to in order to deceive everyone in her life and remain the center of attention. In its first two acts, I wondered if this was where Netflix was headed this summer with its true crime releases: those ladies are crazy. Thankfully, A Toxic Love Story has more on its mind, and where the story goes may seem somewhat predictable to those versed in the genre but still plays out in such a way that it feels bigger than any one player in its unique “love” triangle.
In 2016 in Orange County, California, Ian, a guy who worked at Disneyland for a couple decades before becoming a U.S. Marshal, meets and falls in love with Angela. After a brief courtship, the two become engaged and Angela shares that she’s pregnant with twins. However, their happiness is short-lived as Angela begins receiving threatening emails from a person known as “Lilith.” Ian and Angela link the emails to Ian’s ex-fiancée, Michelle. Ian and Angela are living in the condo that Ian previously owned with Michelle, and so the emails appear motivated by both jealousy and revenge. The emails continue to escalate until Angela calls the police, saying she was attacked by someone who answered a Craiglist ad for a rape fantasy that apparently Michelle had posted while impersonating Angela online. Michelle is arrested and that’s that. Except there’s still an hour left in the documentary.
Lacey doesn’t upend the genre here, and if you’ve seen a few of these (especially on Netflix), you know the house style by now. The first act sets you up with what everyone thought was the story, and then everything gets turned on its head. There are your drone shots over the quiet neighborhood (how could it happen here?!), the talking heads setting our allegiances that will later be overturned when new talking heads enter the story. The movie carefully but nimbly pulling us along through the various twists and turns of the narrative. Lacey acquits herself well at this playbook, and while she does have to hide the ball a bit to make revelations, her film never drags.
What makes A Toxic Love Story stand out is that the story has bigger revelations up its sleeve. The second act’s conclusion makes you think the matter might be settled until you see there are still forty minutes left in the movie, and those final forty minutes elevate A Toxic Love Story from passable true crime fodder to one of the streamer’s better offerings in the genre. Of course, to spoil what happens would be to demolish the thrill of discovery, so I won’t share what exactly transpires in those final forty minutes.
What I will say is that Lacey’s larger movie is a useful document about the unnerving nature of online impersonation. We saw this last year with Unknown Number: The High School Catfish where a single person was able to throw an entire community into chaos through a barrage of text messages, casting suspicion on plenty of innocent people, all emanating from one individual’s disturbing behavior. While stalking and harassment existed well before the internet, texting and social media are force multipliers, allowing assailants to not only retain anonymity, but hurl abuse cheaply and frequently.
Toxic Love Story sends us even deeper into the nature of online identity where we go through the catfishing looking glass, and no one is who they seemed to be because it’s so easy to create fictitious personas in a digital sphere. The film itself is predicated on what we know about online behavior. The idea that a jealous ex is sending abusive emails “anonymously” and the real crime is that there is no law in place to stop such online abuse. The intensity of the bile in these messages may be more aggressive than average, but we know online spaces are like this. Even at the first twist, we understand that not everyone online is who they claim to be. Lacey’s documentary just goes one step further to show how perfidious people can be when they’re weaponizing online anonymity.
There are some points in A Toxic Love Story, especially in connecting its second and third act revelations, that I wished Lacey went a bit deeper. The ending itself is a little too tidy, trying to let audiences exit on a note of uplift despite the wrecking ball of deception we’ve just witnessed. Thankfully, the documentary is not so bleak that it argues we can’t trust anyone. Rather, it’s an insightful look at how malicious behavior gets adapted for the digital age. A Toxic Love Story isn’t merely about bad actors, but how those bad actors know how to use familiar narratives to create phantoms in the machine.
A Toxic Love Story arrives on Netflix today.
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