Netflix offers no answers in Madeleine McCann case
How small is one little girl? This is a thought that returned to me over and over as I watched The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann on Netflix.
As the series examines the search for the child who was abducted from a holiday apartment in Praia de Luz, a resort town in the Algarve region of Portugal just days before her fourth birthday in 2007…
…I kept thinking about how easy it must be to hide such a tiny little body, alive or dead, on such a huge and overcrowded planet.
The documentary repeatedly gives us video evidence of the problem. An aerial view of Praia de Luz, containing thousands and thousands of apartments, which were apparently all searched. Did the police really check under every bed? Inside each cupboard? In the boot of every car?
We see shots of vehicles zooming over the Portuguese border into Spain: it took days to set up roadblocks, and even then, not all vehicles were searched. We see footage of Morocco, a short boat trip from Praia de Luz, featuring busy town squares and then a village in the Atlas Mountains populated by a blonde people, full of little girls who look exactly like Madeleine. “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Brian Kennedy, a wealthy Scot who funded some of the search, “and you don’t even know if it’s there.”
The Madeleine McCann case is probably one of the most famous missing persons cases of all time. Stolen away from her bed 12 years ago, as her parents had dinner with friends at a tapas restaurant a few hundred metres away, more than £11 million has been spent on the search for her, to no avail. In eight episodes, the Netflix documentary explores the case, but leaves us with no answers.
The answer is out there
The story is theoretically a perfect fit for the true crime genre that is becoming ever more popular. It’s an unsolved mystery, but it feels like the answer is out there, just beyond our grasp.
The subjects are photogenic: Maddie with her huge eyes and her unusual right iris, and the very attractive Kate and Gerry McCann.
The investigation contains plenty of twists and turns. Several suspects, including Maddie’s parents, are identified and then turned loose. There are suspicious sightings at gas stations, on roadsides in the early hours of the morning. There’s a deep dive into the dark web and the world of paedophile rings. There’s a detective who ultimately seems to be a villain, a PI who turns out to be a con artist and journalists who build fanciful cases and ruin lives just because they ‘had a hunch’ (many of them get sued in the end).
Upending life in a quiet Portuguese village
There are some feelings about, I don’t know, white privilege? British privilege? as some of the Portuguese reveal their anger and frustration with this well-to-do tourist family that has brought all this negative publicity to their safe and beautiful country. The British press lambasts the Portuguese police force, reporting on them as lazy and corrupt.
Several human and child trafficking activists grimace at the frenzy surrounding the disappearance of this one little English girl, noting that thousands of other disappearances go virtually unnoticed. At one point Gonçalo Amaral, the lead detective on the case, and perhaps the show’s biggest baddie, barks bitterly about how the British view Portugal as “a third world country with a third world police force”.
There are some major problems with the documentary, however. The first thing is that it is incredibly slow. It tops out at eight hours of viewing and man, that’s a lot.
At some points it feels like the producers interviewed literally anybody who volunteered: people who perhaps spotted the back of Maddie’s head at the swimming pool because they were in the Algarve at the same time, freelance journalists whose only claim to fame is being in Praia de Luz when the whole story blew up, locals who saw a weird guy on the beach that summer.
An absolute age is spent on the sniffer dogs who seemed to have smelled “human cadaver” and blood in the boot of the car the McCanns hired weeks after the child’s disappearance. On the one hand, this glacial pace allows you to do a thorough Google search on, say, the sensitivity and specificity of sniffer dogs, while the show plays in the background, and you won’t miss much. On the other hand, eight hours is a lot of time and we all have other shows on our watch list.
The other major problem with the show is perhaps a moral one. The documentary was not endorsed by the McCann family.
The point of Netflix is, ultimately, entertainment. We know that true crime series can be terribly hurtful to victims and their families, as in the case of Hae Min Lee, whose family was incredibly wounded by Serial’s attempt to exonerate the person convicted of murdering her.
The McCanns have endured, in addition to the loss of their daughter, over a decade of trolling and abuse from people who believe they killed Madeleine themselves, and the documentary spends considerable time rehashing the “evidence” that led to this theory, in an era when online abuse is rifer than ever.
In an age where people feel highly entitled to comment on the parenting styles of others, this show prods anew at something the McCanns probably torture themselves with every day of their lives: they didn’t murder their daughter, but they also made a mistake that may have contributed to her disappearance.
Nobody, except the person or persons who abducted Madeleine, knows where she is, and this documentary adds absolutely nothing to the story. Despite all the leads it covers, it goes nowhere. We are left grasping at nothing, at clues that prove to be no more solid than mist, and ultimately simply vanish.
Too soon? Perhaps…
I’m not sure the time to tell the Madeleine McCann story as a Netflix documentary is now. It’s been 12 years, but it’s still too soon. The case is still open. There are several books about it and a deep, deep trove of internet information, and the documentary is really nothing more than the sum of all these things, made visible.
It’s a fascinating story, but The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann misses the mark in more ways than one. In the last episode, Jim Gamble, previously of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre in the UK says he has no doubt that one day, we will discover what happened to Maddie.
Does this documentary help us to get any closer to this goal, or does it simply allow us to continue to gawk at the McCanns? Will it finally push whoever took her to confession, to a point where they can give the McCanns closure, or does it just stir up the nest of trolls who so love to abuse the McCanns? I don’t know.