“Cropsey” has a spooky little premise: it’s a documentary about a string of unsolved child disappearances on Staten Island in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Directors Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman do a great job of framing this mystery – by giving a brief history of Staten Island’s legacy as a dumping ground for lots of things – garbage, psychologically unwell children, and… secrets!
Only one of the missing children was ever found, dead, and a man (Andre Rand) was convicted – a weirdo, for sure, who had been living on the grounds of the abandoned mental institution (partially closed thanks to an investigative report by a young Geraldo Rivera). But was he really the killer? Or were the good folks of Staten Island looking for a boogeyman to take the fall?
These are tantalizing questions, for sure, and ones that are enhanced by the fact that the filmmakers begin a pen pal relationship with the accused murderer, shortly before his second trial for another one of the Staten Island kidnappings. (Based, almost solely, on circumstantial evidence.) But here’s where the movie falters.
While the filmmakers do a good job getting talking head interviews with retired cops that worked on the case and a woman who looked for the original victims who has kept that vigilance up, combing the woods for decades-old corpses. But there’s very little in the ways of investigation. There was no real investigative work on display here. The filmmakers don’t hire a private detective, there isn’t any indication of them combing through microfiche at the local library. There’s file footage of old news reports (one that has a nice moment later on), but beyond that… Not a lot. They could have investigated the crimes, they could have followed-up on potential perpetrators, or interviewed people who were involved in the psychiatric hospital.
None of this is evident, but what we do get instead is the filmmakers on camera. This was really the crippling blow for us. They both narrate and they are both on screen all the time. Most of the time they’re tromping through the park in Staten Island that was adjacent to the psychiatric hospital. Since they have no real personality, their on-screen presence does nothing but take away from the power of the film’s conceit. Instead of coming off as raconteur documentarians looking for justice, they come across more like bored graduate students looking for a senior thesis.
Tantalizing, for sure, but “Crospey” is ultimately crushed under the weight of its own investigate ineffectiveness and the filmmakers’ own narcissism. [C-] – Drew Taylor
