The unhealthy fascination with the unsolved murder of one child reflects back onto the audience; that Netflix acquired this documentary while it was pumping out increasingly faceless true-crime programming suggests they may not have read too deeply into the film’s messaging.
— Rory Doherty (Paste Magazine)
Casting JonBenet departs from former trends in reenactment by moving beyond any attempt to capture a multiplicity of accounts centered on the case (i.e., interpretations of what happened) to demonstrate the diffuse and resonant meanings that high-profile crimes produce in the public imagination through individuated forms of internalization, reflection, critique, uncertainty [and] disavowal.[…]
Considering how to document that which no one has witnessed, James Moran suggests in his essay on documenting the prehistoric subject that the answer lies not within the image, but “always in the discursive field around it: its narration, site of exhibition, reputation, intention, interpretation—even its category at the local video store.” It is precisely these ambiguous questions, manifold theories, and indexical markers that accrued throughout the investigation and over the subsequent years—i.e., the “discursive field around” the case—that form the structure of Green’s film. [Green] therefore chooses not to tell the
story of what happened to one little girl, but rather, of how the life and death of that little girl has been collectively and affectively inscribed onto the local history and myriad individual psyches.[…]
While the content of auditions might lie beyond the predictable, the dates are set up and the list of aspirants known; props like ladders and other stage items are consciously laid out in the background. Not unlike a backstage musical, the film showcases its hybridity as a visible text in which the personal and the performative collide, and divisions between on- and offstage blur.
[…]
The actors auditioning are each serving multiple roles: they are all Boulder locals, they all remember the case, some remember the Ramsey family (if only transiently) in person, but they are also all actors. This means that their ultimate performance has to be located between the social actor, the actor wanting to get the Ramsey reenactment role, and the actor, who in the end, is actually performing a Ramsey scenario.
[…]
The affective dissidence bred by an unsolved mystery’s amassed narrative possibilities reaches its climax in the final sequence of the film, where the cast’s theories of the case and reflections on their own experiences culminate in a final production that functions as a sort of experimental film nestled within the longer work. [The] incoherence of this scenic mélange epitomizes the incompatible and partial possibilities that coexist in the cultural memory of an event such as the JonBenet murder, especially when it mixes with personal experience.
[…]
Finally, while the film’s genesis and existence might pivot on the murder, its meaning is not bounded there. Dropped into the mountainous heart of America, Green paints a picture of an intimate public filled with contingencies, confluences, and echoes. Her participants’ accounts of ongoing abuse, rape, sudden deaths, and murder throw into crisis the established notion that the JonBenet murder is an aberration, the only tragedy Boulder has seen.
— Marc Francis and Linnéa Hussein: Reenactment and Intimacy in Casting JonBenet (Film Quarterly, Fall 2017)
Synopsis: Twenty years after the modern world's most notorious child murder, the legacy of the crime and its impact are explored.