Aided by levelheaded testimonials from forensic specialists and the ex-police chief of Seattle PD, it’s hard not to see some discrepancies in the suicide narrative, like the theory that Cobain wouldn’t have had the energy to kill himself after injecting ten times the usual amount of heroin, or the curious way the shotgun shell landed, which provides the Cobain murder theorists with their own magic bullet theory. I have to admit that the theories concerning the forensic details around the way Cobain’s body was found are enough to get the laymen to at least consider the possibility of reopening the case.
When the visual approach in what’s still supposed to be a documentary is so heavily stylized, complete with a fake rain effect behind the interview subjects, it becomes subconsciously harder to take the material seriously.Īs far as credibility is concerned, “Soaked in Bleach” is a couple of levels above the usual nutjob conspiracy theory documentaries found on YouTube, but it’s not really on par with Errol Morris’ work either. The interviews are also handled in this style, which work against the doc’s goal of exploring only the flat truth. The dramatizations rely on such a heavy recreation of Harris Savides’ glossy yet color-drained digital cinematography, that one half-expects Mark Ruffalo’s David Toschi to show up eating Animal Crackers. Told through the POV of Tom Grant, the PI who was hired by Courtney Love to find Cobain a couple of days before his body was found, the docudrama relies on testimonies by Grant and those related to the case, as well as audio recordings made by Grant, which are then dramatically recreated like a made-for-TV version of “ Zodiac.” I don’t think the “Zodiac” connection is far-fetched, since it’s obvious that DP Ben Kutchins heavily studied David Fincher’s unsung procedural masterpiece. Apart from a thankfully brief bio about Cobain’s early days in his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington, told through interviews with his childhood friends, Benjamin Statler’s film, a labor of love eight years in the making, sticks to the mysterious details surrounding Cobain’s “suicide”. Considering the staggering amount of amateur biographical Cobain documentaries that were released since his death more than twenty years ago, we need another one of those like we need a hole in the, never mind, I’m not going there. It’s easy to accuse “Soaked in Bleach” for many things, being a typical conspiracy theory documentary that makes many leaps in credibility in order to support its narrative being one of them, but a lack of focus is not among its faults. Not that this approach should be necessarily seen as a negative. The fact that the rock star happens to be Kurt Cobain is a secondary detail. While “Montage of Heck” is a loving tribute to Cobain as a human being - “The man behind the fame,” to use an overwrought cliché - “Soaked in Bleach” is a glorified episode of “ CSI” about the mystery surrounding the death of a rock star. However, the two films could not be further away from each other in style, tone, approach, and even genre.
There could be a tendency among Nirvana fans to treat “Soaked in Bleach” as an unofficial continuation of this year’s excellent Cobain doc “ Montage of Heck.” After all, the timeline in “Montage of Heck” ends a couple of months before Cobain’s death, which is pretty much where “Soaked in Bleach” picks up.