Netflix’s Unabomber Dramatizes Kaczynski’s Harvard Years

Netflix began streaming Unabomber on September 25, 2026, a dramatized film that follows Ted Kaczynski’s early years at Harvard and the later FBI investigation that led to his arrest. Directed by Janus Metz, the film stars Jacob Tremblay as the young Kaczynski, Russell Crowe as Harvard psychologist Henry Murray and Shailene Woodley as FBI agent Joanne Miller. The story moves between Kaczynski’s arrival at Harvard in 1958, when he was 16, and the investigation in the 1990s. The Harvard timeline focuses on psychological experiments led by Murray, while the investigation plot gives Miller a central role in pursuing the meaning of Kaczynski’s writings. The film uses the two periods to explore his development, but its structure leaves much of the intervening decades outside the story. Miller is a fictionalized character, according to accounts of the film. The real investigation involved numerous investigators and experts. Kaczynski’s brother David and sister-in-law Linda recognized similarities between the manifesto published in 1995 and earlier letters from Kaczynski, then contacted authorities.