Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003)
Aileen Wuornos was already the subject of enormous media attention long before Nick Broomfield turned up with a camera for the second time. A former highway sex worker convicted of killing six men in Florida between 1989 and 1990, she had by the early 2000s become a strange cultural flashpoint, claimed variously as a feminist martyr, a product of systemic failure, and a straightforward monster. Patty Jenkins had already begun work on what would become Monster (2003), with Charlize Theron's portrayal of Wuornos winning the Academy Award for Best Actress. For a real-world figure to attract that level of dramatic investment is unusual, and it says something about the uncomfortable fascination she generated. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer arrived in the same year as that fictional account, offering something rawer and less shaped: the woman herself, on camera, in the final period before the state of Florida executed her in October 2002.
Broomfield had first made a documentary about Wuornos in 1992, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, which examined the commercial circus surrounding her case, the lawyers, the born-again adoptive figure Arlene Pralle, the general atmosphere of exploitation. This follow-up, co-directed with his long-time cinematographer Joan Churchill, is a different kind of film. Churchill and Broomfield have worked together across decades, and the footage here carries the texture of that collaboration: close, handheld, unglamorous, the kind of images that refuse to let you look away but also refuse to aestheticise what they show. It is cinema verite in a fairly pure sense, footage that feels obtained rather than composed. Rob Lane's score underpins the film without crowding it, tending toward the spare and slightly mournful rather than anything that would nudge the viewer toward a predetermined emotional response. Editor Claire Ferguson shapes material that is, by its nature, fragmented and episodic, much of it built around individual interviews, and the cutting keeps things moving without ironing out the awkwardness that makes these encounters register as genuine.
Broomfield himself is a recurring presence in front of the camera, and the film is partly a record of his being called to testify at Wuornos' trial, which gives it an unusual reflexive quality. Wuornos appears in multiple interviews, increasingly agitated and disconnected, alongside figures from the earlier film: Diane Wuornos, her estranged sister-in-law; Arlene Pralle, the evangelical woman who had adopted her as an adult; and Tyria Moore, her former partner. Each interview adds a different angle on a case that resists simple reading. The question of Wuornos' mental state runs through everything, given that the legal system was simultaneously arguing she was sane enough to be held accountable and to choose her own execution. It is a grim irony the film does not dramatise so much as observe. See also The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young for another documentary that puts its subject's psychology at the centre without editorialising, though the contexts could hardly be more different. For a companion piece on a documentary that similarly unearths a hidden or contested story, I also reviewed Searching for Sugar Man, which approaches its subject with considerably more warmth but shares that same quality of letting footage speak for itself.
This is a documentary about a deeply polarising figure, the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, and I will be straight about where I land: I am not among those inclined to defend her. She killed several men, claiming self-defence each time, a claim I found hard to credit across the board.
She had a horrific childhood, abused and cast out young, and the film does not hide from that; but a terrible past is context, not exoneration, and the crimes remain what they are.
What I kept puzzling over throughout is how she became, for some, a figure to champion. Watching her here, increasingly unstable and unrepentant, I came away finding her a profoundly difficult, often chilling presence, not someone the footage made me want to root for. To its credit, the film does not editorialise much; it lets her speak, and lets you make of her what you will. My own judgement came out a grim one.
As a piece of filmmaking, it is essentially Nick Broomfield revisiting his earlier Wuornos documentary and the people in it, framed around his being called to testify in her case. It reminded me a lot of a Louis Theroux film, that same wry, personal, slightly awkward presence inserting himself into a dark subject, and I mean that as praise. It is, I will admit, fairly one-note, circling the same few beats without building to a great deal. But it is interesting enough, and a sober look at a case that still divides people. Three stars. A decent, Theroux-ish true-crime documentary, more compelling for its subject than for anything especially bold in the telling.
Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer is the kind of documentary that sits with you not because it answers anything but because it refuses to. Lafayette Film and Broomfield's production keeps the scale modest and the methods straightforward, which suits the material: this is not a film that benefits from flourish. The case still provokes argument, still attracts people who want to read Wuornos as a symbol of one thing or another, and the film, to its credit, makes that argument harder rather than easier to sustain. Whether or not you come away with sympathy for her, you come away having spent time with something real, and in a genre where reconstruction and dramatisation increasingly crowd out the actual subject, that counts for something. It is polished but unremarkable as filmmaking, and rather more uncomfortable than it is easy.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2003 | Watched: 2026-10-25
Trailer
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