Season 1 – The Motive

Audience Reviews

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Anthony G @RT18981132 03/02/2025 As disturbing as the mullycoddled 14 year Israeli "genius" & charmer who had no qualms about killing his parents and 2 sisters & played mind-games with his sympathetic interrogators , is his defense attorney gleefully teasing about a motive which the smirking attorney refuses to share. A female journalist is even asked if she could have fallen in love with the brilliant eloquent enigmatic murderer who is now a married man with kids. Who in their right mind would ask such a question?. I cannot fathom too the motive behind the documentary makers' approach to this subject. See more Cem Y @cmyldz23 01/14/2023 The incident captured in this documentary is very interesting and footages make it very eerie. The problem is that 4 episodes are too much and the defense lawyer is too silent. After some point, you watch the same thing again and again... See more Andres C @Enxendru 05/26/2022 The case is interesting. This documentary is not. The editing is horrendous, it is choke full of irrelevant interviews, endlessly interrupted by redundant and repeated images of the accused and his family. Almost none of the people interviewed gives any information relevant to the case, and the ones who do have so little to share that it could have perfectly been fitted in the first episode. Worst of all, there's no real conclusion, so the thinly veiled effort at building tension out of nothing dissolves in an anticlimatic final shot. You'd do better reading the Wikipedia entry for this case. See more 03/02/2022 Terrible. Slow, repetitive and no closure See more 11/10/2021 A rambling dicumentary. Interesting but could've been told better in 2 x 45 min episodes rather than 4 x 30 minute ones - it really feels dragged out by the end. Expect to see the same shots over and over which by hour two starts to get a bit dull. Interviews with his lawyer who apparently knows the motive but will never tell really become pointless after a while. Definitely a fascinating case and I liked the documentary footage look but don't truly watch this and find a motive. I'm not sure there we will ever know. Ps apparently some of it is dramatised. I couldn't tell which bits they were talking about which is clever filmmaking on one level and potentially worrying documentary evidence on another. See more 11/01/2021 This is the most appallingly deceptive "documentary" I've ever seen. Tali Shemesh and Asaf Sudri seem to have learned journalistic ethics from the Weekly World News. "The Motive" employs the standard perspective of dramatic re-creations of the past in order to illustrate a crime scene and relevant events. Over the past thirty years or so this has become standard, using the dramatic music, cinematography and editing techniques found in feature films. However, it is always imperative that the audience can clearly see which moving images are "re-creations of actual events" and which images are archival images produced by television or print journalists. In "The Motive" they have gone to great lengths to make this distinction impossible. In the first episode we see what seems to be a full television crew moving through the crime scene, freely photographing every corpse and blood splatter, even as the cops begin their investigation. Is this entire section faked, perhaps by using a vintage 1980's TV camera? After assessing the video fakery of subsequent episodes, I honestly don't know. The crime scene video is intercut with black-and-white stills which seem to have been snapped at the exact moment we see flashes in the news crew video. This technique is mirrored in the final episode as we see what is clearly a staged re-creation of a meeting between a young female journalist and the young murderer, now in his twenties and released from nine years of juvenile custody. These video sequences are carefully framed and jiggled to look like archival video. The shots are intercut with black-and-white still shots digitally massaged to look like Tri-X prints. Does this mean that the first episode's crime scene sequences were also faked? I can't tell, and that's a crime against journalism. In the second and third episodes this abuse of the audience is even more blatant, as cameras follow the teenage suspect through police stations, hallways, and even the courtroom. We are certainly seeing actors in the year 2020, but Shemesh and Sudri have gone to great lengths to make it all look like 1986 journalism. We now see the face of the young suspect, proving that seemingly authentic family videos shown previously were, in fact, fake. Was all of the family video faked, or just the parts with the young murderer? I can't tell. The level of journalistic deception on display throughout "The Motive" is truly appalling. The photographic lies and ambiguity completely undercut any interest I might have had in the psychology behind the crime at hand. In the end I had zero insight into the motives behind this crime. But I have big questions about the motives of Tali Shemesh and Asaf Sudri in creating this deception. See more Read all reviews

The Motive — Season 1

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