'Chaos: The Manson Murders' review: Overly ambitious documentary

WHAT IT'S ABOUT The true crime subgenre has become the bread and butter of the streaming documentary business, with more titles than one could possibly mention populating queues on Netflix and beyond.

It's natural that iconic filmmaker Errol Morris would return to this world, especially since his past includes the 1988 movie "The Thin Blue Line," one of the greatest documentaries ever made about a real-life crime.

But the choice of subject for his new movie creates a high bar: Morris revisits the Manson murders, arguably the most famous true-crime story of the 20th century.

"Chaos: The Manson Murders" finds the documentarian adapting a 2019 book in which journalist Tom O'Neill argues for an alternative explanation for the murders — instead of the "helter-skelter" scenario promulgated by prosecutors — which was the notion that Manson compelled his followers to murder Sharon Tate and six other people to foment a race war.

The conspiracy theory O'Neill articulates, and which Morris investigates, revolves around a speculated connection between Manson's time in San Francisco in 1967 and covert CIA operations.

MY SAY Morris is smart enough to know that the Manson story has been told with such frequency in the years since the August 1969 murders in Los Angeles that there's no reason to revisit it without a fresh angle.

He's shown a career-long interest in making documentaries that dissect the form itself, the reasons we tell ourselves the stories we do and pursue the interests we pursue, and what all of that says about human nature.

So here he takes the book, titled "Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties," and spins it into an interrogation not just of the facts of O'Neill's theory — which are unprovable at best — but of why O'Neill spent the years he had researching and developing it, and what that reveals about how and why conspiracy theories develop and take root.

It's an ambitious endeavor and only intermittently successful, in part because that's too lofty of a subject for a single film clocking in at 96 minutes.

A large percentage of the movie must regurgitate the narrative of Manson forming his family, absconding to Spahn Ranch, trying to make it into the music business, targeting the house on Cielo Drive and then the LaBiancas the next night, and all of the other facts that are no less horrifying 55 years later, even if they've become totally familiar.

We get a clinical rundown of the murders themselves, and abundant file interviews with Manson and family members like Susan Atkins.

That leaves little time to explain the CIA's Project MKUltra and Operation CHAOS programs, which were built around testing mind control efforts and domestic espionage, respectively, and what they theoretically had to do with Manson. 

And it offers even less of an opportunity for Morris to explore the larger themes by putting it all into a broader social context.

BOTTOM LINE "Chaos: The Manson Murders" would have worked better as a multi-episode series.