Spoiler Warning: This article contains spoilers about “Unknown Number: The High School Catfish.”
“Unknown Number: The High School Catfish” is a documentary released on Aug. 29 that follows a true crime story that quickly became popular on social media. Lauryn Lacari was once an innocent teenage girl in a small town in a great relationship with her boyfriend Owen when she randomly started getting sent mysterious text messages. The texts started as rude comments about Lauryn’s appearance, but it turned dark quickly, targeting things like what Lauryn was wearing or doing in class.
After hearing about this documentary from TikTok and friends at school, I was interested to learn more about it. I watched many videos about the actual incident on TikTok, and I scrolled through the comments to look for people’s opinions on it. After looking through social media, I saw many spoilers about this story, but I still wanted to watch the documentary. It interested me because cyber bullying is a very real thing, and I wanted to see what action was taken in this situation to prevent people from being harmed further.
However, watching this documentary didn’t make me feel that Lauryn was being saved; instead, it seemed as if she was cast under a spell. Lauryn’s final interview was confusing, and I didn’t quite understand what was going to be done in the future to help her continue with her life after dealing with all this trauma. It was revealed toward the end of the documentary that the person who was sending the messages was Lauryn’s mom, Kendra. This was obviously traumatizing for Lauryn to find out about, but I felt that in her ending interviews, she seemed rather unfazed. It surprised me how much care she still had for her mother. But, the documentary ended before she actually got a chance to explain why she thought her mom was harassing her, and her mom was not able to explain why she was attacking her daughter.
Overall, I felt that this documentary was more of an overview of what happened, instead of a deeper look into the “why” it happened. A good documentary should have a strong summary of the story and then take a deep dive into the people involved, asking personal questions that allows viewers to have behind-the-scenes information. The problem with this documentary that was missing was that all of the information presented could be found from different sources. Instead, they should have asked Kendra, Lauryn’s mom more questions about the situation because she wasn’t asked many questions about how she felt about Owen.
The ending was quite the interesting shock, but I feel that the viewers didn’t really get an explanation for why the person was sending these messages. After reading more articles about the situation, I learned a lot more about it than I did from just watching the documentary. The only reason I kept watching it was because I wanted to fully understand Lauryn’s story more. However, after watching it, I didn’t gain any useful information that made the story clearer or more detailed.
I wouldn’t recommend watching this documentary because it doesn’t go more into depth than just watching a couple of two-minute TikTok videos about the situation. More information can be found about Lauryn and Owen’s story by researching news articles and looking into what other people think about the documentary. In fact, this documentary left me with more questions about what happened than answers. Many of the people’s reactions in the documentary seemed puzzling and made me wonder if there was more going on.
Watching how Lauryn reacted to finding out that her mom was harassing her for 22 months made me feel that there should have been another interview with her reaction, after she had some time to think about what happened. I understand that Lauryn had to process a lot, but I think that she should have been asked more in depth questions like, “Do you think your mom was affected by a mental illness?” or “How will you approach your mom when you are allowed to have contact with her?” The interview questions should have been more focused on what was really going on in the family, instead of just asking about the surface issues.