Documentarian Marina Zenovich has carved out a niche as a filmmaker gifted at taking celebrities and challenging their entrenched public images — not necessarily in an iconoclastic way, but in a way that says, “Here’s the story you think you know with enough complicating information to force you to contemplate, if not reconsider.”
It can be a frustrating approach if you happen not to be convinced that reconsideration is worth the effort — see 2000’s four-hour Lance, about Lance Armstrong — but from Roman Polanski to the Duke Lacrosse scandal to her recent CNN doc on Chevy Chase, Zenovich has established a brand.
The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson
The Bottom Line
Sad and poignant, but not very deep.
Venue: SXSW Film Festival (Documentary Spotlight)
Airdate: Friday, April 3 (Netflix)
Director: Marina Zenovich
1 hour 37 minutes
Watching Zenovich’s The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson, premiering at SXSW ahead of a Netflix launch in April, it becomes unavoidably clear that Zenovich is much less effective when it comes to finding similar depth in a story people might not know.
Boasting a million-dollar smile and an increasingly impressive pile of cycling accolades, Moriah Wilson seemed to be on the verge of a national profile when she was murdered in 2022 in Austin, Texas. The story earned headlines because of the sensationalism of its deadly love triangle, but when Lifetime adapted it as a quickie TV movie in 2024, the title — Yoga Teacher Killer: The Kaitlin Armstrong Story — focused on the convicted killer and not the victim.
Kudos to Zenovich, then, for using The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson to reassert Wilson’s presence at the center of the story. But the documentary is an ungainly blend of ultra-earnest hagiography and trashy true-crime sensationalism, without being completely satisfying as either.
Zenovich’s portrait of Wilson is affectionate but superficial, and while the murder investigation and trial had some zigging and zagging, it’s all less wild than fans of that genre might be hoping for. Even if that’s the documentary’s point — to strip away the sensationalism and reveal that the “truth” is pretty basic — the two pieces rarely mesh successfully.
Working with the active participation of Wilson’s family — father Eric, mother Karen and brother Matt are all on-camera and obviously provided a lot of documentation — and an assortment of friends, including Caitlin Cash, whose Austin apartment was the site of the tragedy, Zenovich offers a snapshot of Wilson’s growth from adorable baby babbling on home video to aspiring skier to burgeoning cycling juggernaut.
Now maybe you know more than I do about gravel cycling and other cycling disciplines, but I don’t think the doc does a very good job of explaining what Wilson actually competed in, its scope and dimensions or what made her especially skilled beyond her dedication and persistence. I know she rode long distances and sometimes won races by large margins, but it only feels partially informative.
Even the people who knew her best talk about her in saintly platitudes rather than specifics, and the use of narrated portions of her journal to give additional insight mostly proves that she was a young woman with big dreams. I was glad, at least, that Zenovich got an actress, Olivia Sinnott, to read the diary excerpts rather than giving in to recent documentary convention and doing an AI recreation of her voice. I was less glad with the segment in which Eric reads from his daughter’s diary, which isn’t quite creepy but sure feels intrusive.
Aspects of the backstory for the murder — Wilson had romantic feelings for cyclist Colin Strickland, who was living with on-and-off girlfriend Kaitlin Armstrong — are tawdry; if Zenovich doesn’t want it to come across that way, she needed to steer her subjects more deftly. Cycling journalist Ian Dille seems particularly snarky in addressing the Strickland/Armstrong relationship, smiling and laughing while discussing a situation that ended in murder. It’s a tone that fits horribly with the sobriety of the rest of the documentary, and one that could have easily been avoided in editing.
When the documentary turns to the crime and its investigation, Zenovich has various cops and attorneys giving dry versions of how they narrowed things down to Armstrong as a suspect and her subsequent attempts to flee justice. Again, this tone aligns poorly with the memories of grieving family members and the like.
The conclusion everybody comes to is that it’s impossible to know or understand what went through Armstrong’s mind and what role Strickland played in any of this, and if that’s the case, it’s unclear what the documentary thinks it’s accomplishing. Even one or two people who knew Strickland and Armstrong have no insights into their relationship. It turns out at the end that Zenovich had access to Strickland for one conversation in which he looks haggard, but says nothing of substance.
The nothing moment with Strickland shows how he has clearly been permanently altered by this situation, which fits with the closing segments focused on the long-term impact on Wilson’s family and perhaps most potently, on Cash, who still lives in the same apartment. But if half the documentary is a nuts-and-bolts true crime recap, and one of the only living souls with unrevealed information appears and says nothing, it’s a wet blanket over everything.
The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson captures a sad story and its aftermath, but I’m not sure I came away with any real understanding of its heroine or her tragic death. And sometimes tragic death truly is incomprehensible. But it feels too soft and tidy in this film.
