Netflix’s ‘Unknown Number’ Raises Some Troubling Questions

The following post contains spoilers for Unknown Number: The High School Catfish.

The #1 movie on Netflix today isn’t Kpop Demon Hunters or the streaming service’s glossy new adaptation of the best-seller The Thursday Murder Club, or even Shrek. (Shrek is currently the #3 movie on all of Netflix right now, by the way. That damn ogre really is an all-star.)

No, the #1 Netflix movie right now is a little true-crime documentary called Unknown Number: The High School Catfish. Once you hear the premise, which sounds like a horror movie come to life, it’s not hard to understand why.

A teen couple from a tiny town in Michigan are targeted by an anonymous cyber stalker, who sends hundreds of harassing, vulgar, and even threatening text messages over the course of several years. The person sending the text appears to be intimately familiar with private details of the couple’s life, suggesting the criminal is someone they know or even love, but every obvious suspect has an alibi. Blocking the offending number doesn’t work because the perpetrator is using a messaging app that disguise their identity. The local police are baffled. The texts go on and on, even after the couple breaks up.

READ MORE: Netflix’s Titan Documentary Is a Disturbing Cautionary Tale

The facts of the case are already compelling even before you consider the specifics of the film, which was directed by Skye Borgman. The production gained access to essentially every major player in this tawdry drama, including the young man and woman who were cyber stalked, both their sets of parents, all of the other young people they associated with, the principal and superintendent of their school, the law enforcement officials who investigated the crime, and even a classmate who was suspected of being the culprit when initial evidence pointed in her direction. (It turned out she was framed by the actual catfisher.)

The real-life participants in these events not only sat down for interviews with Borgman, they reenacted a lot of what took place for her camera. Unknown Number is filled with slow-mo sequences in moodily lit bedrooms and high school hallways where teens and parents look warily at their phones.

Reenactments are nothing new in documentary films, and while they are typically performed by actors, it’s not unheard of for a doc’s subjects to play themselves on camera. But I am not sure I have ever seen a doc take the additional step that Unknown Number did, which was to have the person who ultimately confessed to the crimes and pled guilty to two counts of stalking a minor — who (again, spoiler alert) turned out to be Kendra Licari, the mother of the female victim — actively participate in the creation of the film, not only as an interview subject but as one of the performers in the reenactments. 

That’s Licari in the image above and the one at the top of this article, lounging on a sofa in the dark, apparently recreating one of the moments where she allegedly sent her own daughter one of these texts — messages which ranged from insulting her physical appearance to telling her to kill herself. Licari’s actions are unfathomable, but the decision to have her literally perform them for the camera in the movie is almost as shocking.

From a storytelling perspective, it’s not difficult to understand why Licari was included. If every single person in this story appeared except for her, she would emerge as a glaring suspect almost immediately. Instead, the fact that we see her in early scenes speaking lovingly about her daughter and their relationship makes it seem like she couldn’t possible have been involved. That, in turn, makes even more mind-boggling when it’s revealed that she was the one who eventually went to prison. (Licari was released in August of 2024.)

Speaking with Netflix’s own news outlet Tudum, Borgman had this to say about Licari’s role in the doc….

‘It was a long process with Kendra,’ Borgman recalls of the efforts it took to get her on board, adding that she eventually agreed to the opportunity to directly speak to questions circling around the case. ‘That was appealing to her, [to] sit down and tell her story from her perspective and that Lauryn [could] see her do that. She wanted to do it, I think, for her daughter.’

It may be worth noting here that according to Unknown Number, Licari is not permitted to meet with her daughter following her release from prison, where, again, she served time for the crime of stalking her own child.

I suppose it’s only fair to let Licari give her side of the story. In interviews, she offers a variety of defenses and excuses for her actions. At one point, she argues that “a lot of us have probably broken the law at some point or another and not gotten caught,” and gives the example of a person who drives drunk but never gets pulled over. In another, she states that she was “in an awful place mentally” at the time. She also insists that someone else sent the initial text messages that began the whole episode and that she only started sending more of them herself at a later date, a claim others in the documentary treat with skepticism. Right before the doc ends, she also reveals she was abused as a teenager herself, and that parenting a high-school-age daughter dredged up painful memories of her own trauma.

But I am not sure any of her explanations show any true remorse, and the scenes showing Licari recreating illegal acts add nothing to the film, certainly not enough to justify the thorny ethical issues raised by doing so. Nothing is clarified by watching Licari peering down at a cell phone from the shadows — or, for that matter, by having the victims of these crimes relive them on camera for a mass streaming audience. The line between education and exploitation gets awfully murky at times.

The widespread attention Unknown Number is getting has prompted a debate around kids’ access to cell phones, and the ease with which those tools can be used as weapons. That’s an important conversation, but I hope at some point there’s also a discussion around how this movie uses these people as well, mostly in the service of a cheap twist and creating “good television.” I think this documentary needs a documentary of its own. How did this movie get made in this way?