Dull and Dehumanizing True Crime Our Father Documents Fertility Doctor’s Spree
Turning away from grisly murders and harrowing sex cults, the true-crime documentaries and docuseries saturating streamers have recently been dominated by scams. Catfishing, social engineering, the looting of investors and tech bros—it’s the schadenfreude porn of late capitalism. Satisfying to our morbid curiosity, appealing to our smug sense of superiority, and all (mostly) without exploiting the families or victims of something truly heinous. Our Father, first-time director Lucie Jourdan’s Netflix documentary, splits the difference to find the worst of all worlds: A fraud captivating enough to fill a news segment, half-heartedly unfolded to the detriment of all parties involved. The case of Donald Cline, an Indianapolis fertility doctor who decided to personally impregnate his patients instead of using whatever samples they’d been promised (be they donor sperm or that of their husbands), is made as repetitive and uninspired as a creepy old quack masturbating day in and day out behind closed office doors.
Sure, it’s seriously gross. Our Father’s failures aren’t in its lurid source material, but in its leering execution. Jourdan’s a reality TV mainstay, overseeing everything from the thematically related sextuplet series Six Little McGhees to shlock like Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy and Ghost Hunters Academy. This familiarity with short-and-sweet, overproduced-to-get-you-through-the-commercials episodic narrative is stretched to its limit over Our Father’s 90 minutes. The Cline case is far too simple to be spread so thin, especially with so little interest in or access to the main players. Cline illicitly fathered a small Aryan militia’s worth of blonde, blue-eyed Indianans, but we mostly devote our time to embarrassing reenactments (with an aesthetic somewhere between Z-grade horror and Z-grade porn) and an unending procession of half-siblings with the same sad story.
Jacoba Ballard, the woman who was the first to figure out something was fishy after a 23andMe DNA test, took it upon herself not only to confront Cline, but to be a sort of welcome wagon to every new branch on her ever-complicating family tree. That means we get walked through the same revelation time and time again: So-and-so takes a DNA test, finds out they have way too many matches, gets a message from Jacoba, grapples with their new and terrible reality. Except…there’s not much grappling. Interviews with the misled mothers are far briefer than those with the children, and neither are particularly insightful.
Only late in the game, when the narrative’s completely run out of steam, are we given a glimpse at the complex coping methods of a woman more interesting than the entire rest of the film. She knew Cline socially and, despite detesting his mansplaining sexism, respected his fertility work. She then unknowingly gave birth to his twin daughters and remains torn, decades later, between her disgust at what happened and her love for her children. That’s a whole movie right there. We get about 30 seconds of it. Sorry, but there are just so many more Cline kids willing to talk!
It’s this focus on numbers—complete with a stylized chapter-heading structure (accompanied by an ejaculatory sound effect the subtitles helpfully describe as “man moaning”) documenting the mounting number of discovered children—-that makes the film feel so numbly dehumanizing. It’s upsetting and outrageous that Cline tricked so many women. It’s similarly upsetting that Our Father seems more devoted to using the running total as a shock-oriented reveal than to the actual people that number represents.