Russell Crowe spends much of Netflix's new Kaczynski film administering a personality assessment, and that is the genuinely strange thing about the Henry Murray Harvard experiment at the center of "Unabomber": the hardest scenes in a movie about a bomber have nothing to do with bombs. They involve a teenager sitting under hot lights while a stranger reads his private journal back to him and tells him what kind of person it proves he is. Meanwhile the industry built on four-letter self-knowledge — the one you fed ten minutes of your life to last week — has said almost nothing about the fact that its own family tree runs straight through that room.
What the Study Actually Was
Twenty-Two Undergraduates, Weekly, for Years
The subject pool was small: 22 Harvard undergraduates, according to the accounts circulating in the Hacker News thread that collected the reporting on this case. Participation was not a single afternoon. The sessions ran roughly two hours, once a week, and the accounts referenced there put a typical participant's total near 200 hours — a figure that only makes sense when you understand the program stretched across several academic years rather than a semester. Ted Kaczynski, who the Boston Globe notes entered Harvard at 16 as a prodigy from a working-class background, was still a teenager when it started.
Two hundred hours is the number worth sitting with. That is more contact time than most people spend with a therapist in a year, delivered to someone who had not yet turned 20, by an institution he had every reason to trust.
The Deception Was the Method
The film's screenwriters, Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves — both former Harvard students themselves — laid out the mechanics in an interview with What's on Netflix, and the specifics matter more than any summary of them. Students were recruited believing they would debate a fellow undergraduate about their personal philosophy. Instead they were put in front of graduate students or law students in what amounted to an interrogation. The room was heated. Spotlights were aimed at them. Audio recordings of their own performance were played back so their handling of it could be critiqued. Separately, subjects were required to keep diaries containing intimate material — secrets, sexual fantasies — and those journals were then shared with the people conducting the sessions.
Murray's own characterization of the attacks on his subjects, quoted in the material gathered around the case, was that they were "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive." Greaves told What's on Netflix the team barely had to embellish: "it goes to show how crazy I think these tests were that we really didn't take much dramatic license."
The Man Running It Was an Assessment Specialist
A Career Built on Watching People Under Pressure
Henry Murray was not a fringe operator. He was a prominent Harvard psychologist, and the discussion around this case consistently connects him to the Office of Strategic Services — the wartime body that pioneered putting candidates under deliberate stress and scoring how they held up. Read the Harvard sessions with that background in view and the architecture becomes legible: induce pressure, observe performance, record it, score the person. That is assessment methodology, not cruelty improvised for its own sake, which is exactly what makes it worse.
To be precise about the limits here: none of the four sources draws a line from Murray to the Myers-Briggs instrument, and I am not drawing one either. There is no evidence he had anything to do with it. The claim is narrower and harder to dismiss — the mid-century conviction that a person's inner workings could be elicited, scored, and filed by a trained observer is the soil both grew in. Murray is the extreme case, not the ancestor.
No Remorse, and a Motive the Writers Name Out Loud
Asked whether Murray ever showed regret about his methods, Greaves answered: "Not really." The screenwriters' reading is that egocentrism drove the project — that Murray was chasing the fame and prestige that publication would bring, which they frame as an uncomfortable mirror of Kaczynski's own appetite for recognition. Whether the study was formally part of MKULTRA gets argued in the Hacker News thread without resolution, and the honest answer is that the visible sources do not settle it. Treat anyone who states it flatly in either direction as going beyond what is actually known.
What Netflix Added, and What It Admits It Doesn't Have
The Diagnosis the Movie Wrote In
Director Janus Metz's film stars Jacob Tremblay as the young Kaczynski, Crowe as Murray, Shailene Woodley as FBI agent Joanne Miller, and Michael Laurence as the older Kaczynski; Montreal's McGill University stood in for Harvard. It had a special screening at Metrograph in New York on Thursday, September 17, 2026, with Metz and Tremblay in attendance, and the Globe's September 24 piece said it debuted that Friday on Netflix.
IndieWire's review, which runs under the blunt headline that Netflix invents a diagnosis for Kaczynski, flags the central liberty: the film has Murray diagnose Kaczynski with schizophrenia while he is still an undergraduate, when the real Kaczynski received no such diagnosis until his trial decades later. The review also notes that Murray and Kaczynski had no actual relationship and barely met during the experiments. So the movie's most quotable idea — the assessor who saw it coming — is the part that didn't happen.
"Still Classified" Is Doing a Lot of Work in That Sentence
Metz has been telling press that "his file is still classified," and that what we know comes from "comments made over the years by people involved, even Kaczynski himself." The screenwriters put it differently and more usefully: Harvard has never released the documents from these tests, they tried to locate them, and they read the silence as an institution protecting itself. Those are not the same claim. One implies a government seal; the other describes a university declining to open its own filing cabinet.
And the record isn't blank. Chalsen and Greaves note that the report Murray himself published on the tests is publicly available, and that session recordings have surfaced. What's missing is the individual subject material — which means the most confident statements you'll read this month about what was done to one specific 17-year-old are inferences, including the film's.
1959 Versus the Quiz on Your Phone
Put the two side by side and the useful distinction isn't severity — it's who the output was built to serve.
| Murray's Harvard study (c. 1959–1962) | A free online type test today | |
|---|---|---|
| What subjects were told | You'll debate a peer about your philosophy | Find out who you really are in 10 minutes |
| What actually happened | Interrogation by grad or law students, heated room, spotlights | A self-report questionnaire, no observer |
| Time commitment | ~2 hours weekly; reportedly near 200 hours total | Usually under 15 minutes |
| Sample size | 22 undergraduates | Millions of self-selected takers |
| Private material collected | Required diaries covering secrets and sexual fantasies | Whatever the answers imply, plus account and device data |
| Who saw it | Shared with the interrogators, against subjects' expectation | You first — and whoever the privacy policy permits |
| Who the result served | The researcher's publication | The platform's engagement, and your curiosity |
| Ability to walk away | Years-long enrollment at your own university | Close the tab |
| Records available now | Murray's published report; individual files unreleased | Opaque scoring, instant verdict |
Why the Family Tree Makes You a Smarter Test-Taker
Assessment Was Invented to Sort People, Not to Comfort Them
The single most instructive detail in this whole story is the journals. Subjects wrote down their secrets under one understanding of who would read them, and that material was handed to the people whose job was to take them apart. The deception wasn't incidental to the method — it was load-bearing. That is what an assessment instrument looks like when the person being measured is not the customer.
Modern type tests flipped the marketing entirely. The result is sold to you, framed as insight, delivered in affirming language. But the direction the data travels hasn't reversed: you still produce the input, someone else still owns the scoring rules, and you still receive a verdict you cannot audit. Four letters generated that way can be genuinely useful as a vocabulary for talking about yourself. They are not a finding.
Three Questions Worth Asking Before You Tap "Start"
- Who sees this besides me? The Harvard subjects got that answer wrong, and it was the most consequential thing about their participation. A privacy policy is the modern version of the question.
- What happens if I answer unflatteringly? Murray's sessions punished the performance. A test that only ever returns a compliment isn't measuring you; it's retaining you.
- Can I see the logic, or only the verdict? Murray published his report. Most quizzes publish nothing — and Harvard, nearly seventy years on, still hasn't released the files that would let anyone check his work.
"Unabomber" will keep generating argument for months, and most of it will be about whether a psychological experiment can be blamed for what a man did twenty years later — a question the sources themselves can't answer and that the film resolves by inventing a diagnosis. The more durable takeaway is smaller and sits closer to home. The confidence that a person can be elicited, scored, and summarized is a mid-century inheritance, and we accepted it without reading the terms. If Harvard ever opens those files, the detail to look for isn't what Murray concluded about subject after subject. It's whether any of them were ever told.
-EditorZ
Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash
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