Gay Talese

Gerald Foos

Josh Koury

Myles Kane

Geralyn White Dreyfous

Julie Parker Benello

Dan Cogan

Adam Del Deo

Ken Pelletier

Jeremiah Zagar

Angus Wall

Jeremy Yaches

Trisha Koury

Lisa Nishimura

Cristobal Moris

Linda Carlson

Jason Spingarn-Koff

Jenny Raskin

Paula M. Froehle

Steven H. Cohen

Joel Goodman

Leslie Bloome

Ryan Collison

Joanna Fang

Nick Seaman

Tom Paul

Chris Stangroom

Diego Jimenez

Julian Angel

Benjamin Krause

Joy Ngiaw

Documentary

Crime

Voyeur

Impact Partners

Brooklyn Underground Films

Public Record

Chicago Media Project

United States of America

Click here for a video version of this review: https://youtu.be/zHv4OKXSf08

I've watched a lot of documentaries, and few have left me scratching my head as much as _Voyeur_. This is a Netflix Original Documentary that has been in the catalogue for a while. It's a bit of an odd one, and putting this review together has been hard nail down exactly what was so frustrating about it.

Let's start with the official description:

_Legendary journalist Gay Talese unmasks a motel owner who spied on his guests for decades. But his bombshell story soon becomes a scandal of its own._

The core or catalyst for this is a man named Gerald Foos who bought a motel with the specific intention of engaging in his hobby of watching people. He purposely chose a motel that had a roof pitch high enough that he could install what he called an "observation platform" along the ceiling cavity to that he could shimmy along it and spy on the people in the rooms below through the air vents.

Sounds a bit like some kind of horror movie doesn't it? It is, but the documentary barely spends any time on this aspect of the story, and I think this is where my frustration comes from. They never really address the fact that this guy was spying on people in their hotel rooms, every night, in their most intimate moments. It seems more interested in Foos as a character, and as a result the things he did are kinda swept aside like they were no big deal. There is little, if any discussion of the wrongness or immorality of what he did.

So, far from being a documentary about this a-hole and what he did, it is instead more a documentary about how a journalist pulls together an article over a period of years. It seems unsure about exactly who the subject of it is. They voyeur of the title is definitely there all the way through, but this in the end felt like it was more about Talese.

I didn't not know what to make of this once it was all over. It has its interesting parts, but I'm having a hard time recommending it.

English

Voyeur | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix

Voyeur | Clip: A Guest of the Voyeur | Netflix