Behind Ctrl Alt Desire’s glib title is a thoughtful docuseries
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Grant Amato killed his parents, Chad and Margaret, and older brother Cody.
The story (warning: some structural spoilers ahead)
I watched Paramount+'s newish docuseries Ctrl Alt Desire in a morning, for what that's worth – but I haven't worked out what that is in fact worth for a viewer who is neither 1) obliged to watch all three episodes for the purposes of critique, nor 2) inclined to resist Googling the case as a way of testing the material's per se ability to compel. I don't regret watching the whole thing, and I don't regret keeping my phone in my pocket while I did so*. The question is, would you?
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*Granted, I had come to a fiddly point in a knitting pattern and couldn't spare the digits I'd have needed for a second screen, but the outcome's the same.
Maybe – but if you take it in the same way I did, letting it do its work and not augmenting its narrative choices with any other information, Ctrl Alt Desire is quite effective. (Starting with the title, which lands initially as a corny bit of SEO-forward wordplay, then gains dimension as Amato's nice-guy narcissism blooms and rots.) Through the first episode, CAD is very cagey about why Amato – whose conversations from behind bars with director Colin Archdeacon spanned four years – is incarcerated at all, even though the series begins with contemporary news reports about Seminole County, FL sheriffs searching for him as a person of interest.
Information is doled out deliberately, about Grant's oogy self-described soulmate relationship with his brother, about his bizarre down- and outward spiral at work. It can feel manipulative, in that studied "please mash the watch-next button" way streaming content sometimes can. At the same time, though, it mirrors Amato and his desire for control, over the story, over his image, over Archdeacon's interest and ours too. As the minutes tick by, Amato starts telling on himself, literally and figuratively, and as we learn more and more about the collapse of his online persona that led in turn to an existential crisis and then to the annihilation of his family, a similar shift is taking place for us.
Amato goes from pitiably maladjusted dork who made a couple bad choices to entitled and deluded malignancy: he congratulates himself for killing his parents quickly so they wouldn't have time to feel afraid; he reacts with gratification – which he either thinks isn't evident, or doesn't care to hide – to the news that the killings and related coverage traumatized the "cam girl," Silviya, whom so many stories pointed to as Amato's motive. By the end, you may wish Archdeacon had never made CAD, so contentedly is Amato wallowing in the "there's no such thing as negative attention" of it all.
That grimy sense that director and audience have all gotten played, and given a narcissist what he wanted all along, is a very low-pH commentary on the true-crime genre and its historic rewarding of baddies with glory. …Well, provided that's the intent. If it's not, Archdeacon should just pretend it is and take the W, but if it is, not that I need my hand held, but CAD could have drawn the parallels more clearly as a 110-minute feature, and used a less predictable route into the heart of Amato's darkness. The build of the series is an in-betweener: it actually doesn't do some of the full-background things you'd expect of a conventional three-part streaming doc, so it ends up with a handful of frustrating gaps in terms of, say, Amato's father's first marriage, or the dark secrets Amato hints at as mitigating factors in the crime but never shares.
But then the build is also familiar enough (including the usual complement of unhelpful re-enactments) that I had a little too much time to wish for a longer, more deeply reported series about online sex work, how sex workers manage boundary-crossing when there's so much of it in their "pitch," how big a problem stalking is compared to the general population, stress management, etc. etc. Ctrl Alt Desire doesn't position itself as about that, but it has enough talking-head interviews with industry talent that I did feel the opportunity as missed.
But until that project gets made, I can recommend CAD. It doesn't entirely live up to its potential, but it's better than you might expect. - SDB