Cancel your Sunday plans.
Netflix dropped The Crash this week. I am telling you now, not as a critic but as a friend: this is the one you carve out 90 minutes for.
Here’s the setup. Early Sunday morning, July 31, 2022. Strongsville, Ohio, a quiet suburb outside Cleveland. A passerby calls 911 because a Toyota Camry has slammed into the side of a brick building at over 100 miles per hour. Three young people are trapped inside. The driver, 17-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla, survives — her fuzzy Prada slippers tangled around the gas pedal. Her boyfriend Dominic Russo, 20, and his friend Davion Flanagan, 19, do not.
For a while, everyone believes what it looks like: a teenage girl fell asleep at the wheel, two boys lost their lives, a community grieves. Mackenzie posts from her hospital bed. TikTok sends sympathy. She is the grieving girlfriend.
She is not the grieving girlfriend.
This is not a documentary that pretends to investigate something we’ve all already Googled. It actually walks you, step by step, through how detectives moved this case from “tragic accident” to “calculated murder.” The black box data showing she never braked. The surveillance footage of the car flooring it down a street she rarely drove on. No swerve, no skid. The medical examiner reclassifying both deaths from accident to homicide. By the time you get there, you’re not watching a true-crime doc. You are watching a case being built in front of you.
Director Gareth Johnson gets the people who were actually in the room for the last six months of this relationship. This means Dom’s brother Angelo, his mother Christine, and what they describe is not a love story gone wrong. It’s something darker and more specific. There is a moment involving a phone call from inside a car on Interstate 71, two weeks before the crash, that I am not going to spoil. You will hear what Mackenzie screamed. You will feel the floor drop out.
Every true-crime doc has a “this is the part that wrecks you” person, and here it’s Davion Flanagan. Adopted at eight. High school athlete. He just needed a ride home. The prosecutor described him in court as “just cargo. He was just a suitcase in the backseat in the defendant’s mind.” Johnson gives him real space in the film, which more true-crime directors should learn from. He is not collateral. He is the reason this matters.
Mackenzie’s attorney waived the jury and gambled on a single judge,Cuyahoga County’s Nancy Margaret Russo. Side note, there is no relation to Dominic. The defense argued she had blacked out from a fainting condition. The judge was unmoved. Her ruling — “This was not reckless driving. This was murder” — and her description of Mackenzie morphing into “literal hell on wheels” are now the phrases welded to this case forever.
Also, the last ten minutes are bonkers.
So, there you go. Your weekend plans. Then jump over to my Facebook group to discuss further.
I sat down with director Gareth Johnson and producer Angharad Scott to talk about the prison interview, what they left on the cutting room floor, and how they decided which pieces of Mackenzie’s online life to put back on a screen.
Listen to my interview here. (Share it with your friends and family too.)
Send this story to anyone — or drop the embed into a blog post, Substack, Notion page. Every play sends rev-share back to What to Watch With Kate Casey.
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