Netflix's The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes is a bottom-of-the-barrel documentary that dehumanizes Marilyn Monroe

RogerEbert.com

"Netflix loves a mess," says Nick Allen. "Take two of the company’s hottest offerings right now: season five of Selling Sunset and Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes. The streaming service by no way invented this type of entertainment, but they have the authorship of a content company that churns out such provocative reflections on reality, week by week. Its latest slop, scraped from the bottom of the barrel and served for an audience of armchair detectives, is Emma Cooper's The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, and it's a special kind of gross. It is too touch-and-go, too speculative about her life and mysterious death, to be of any genuine purpose." Allen adds: "For all the time the film spends saying her name, touching upon the different traumatic relationships she had in her life, and briefly showing clips from when she thrived in front of the movie camera, Monroe remains dehumanized. She has been cast here as another disembodied voice that shares close-ups with ominous footage of rolling audio tapes."

ALSO:

• The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes presents a banal rehash of established facts and well-circulated rumors about Marilyn Monroe’s life
• What saves the documentary to some extent is the wealth of fabulous archival material, expertly assembled