Citizen Sleuth (2025) Documentary Review: A layered, wildly entertaining interrogation into the moral grey area between fact and fiction in true crime

True crime was always around, even though we did not have that specific phrase to denote it. Lovers of shows like “Dateline” have now shifted to streaming services or podcasts that make a crime investigation more thrilling than movies based on them. What makes true crime documentaries and podcasts so damn thrilling is the way in which they psychologically manipulate us into being intrigued by the said case at hand, making you feel like a fly-on-the-wall that’s perched there to solve it on your own.

I guess that’s how Emily Nestor, the subject of Chris Kasick’s documentary “Citizen Slueth,” must have felt when she first got to know about Jaleayah Davis’s death, which, according to her and eventually a lot of other people, was wrongly implicated as an accident. Nestor, from the first frame to the last, gives off paranoid Gen-Z energy – someone who is desperate to get to the bottom of it, like a lot of us who revel in drama that’s beyond our viewpoint but unfathomably interesting because it’s unsolved.

Mind you, Nestor, who initially feels like a broad caricature, is never villainized; although Kasick could have put the brakes on the loud, comical score that he often uses while she is on the screen. However, the doc drives an insane level of precision out of the general obsession for true crime by showing us just how her podcast “Mile Marker 181” came to be, and how she single-handedly gave birth to a cult-following that kept coming back because she always managed to hang the listeners on a thread that felt open-ended.

The doc shows Nestor is as a lover of the crime-solving genre — she is obsessed with Clarice Starling from “The Silence of the Lambs” — and might feel like someone you will hate-watch while scrolling Instagram reels. However, that doesn’t take away from the fact that she gets you invested in a genuine case about a Black woman from Marietta, Ohio — something that fuels her passion for piecing things together and getting to the bottom of some form of ‘truth’ that she has in her mind.

The Jaleayah Davis case becomes central to Nestor’s journey because she found the placement of Davis’ clothes, the way her body bashed against the highway railing, and the place in which her car was found to be inaccurate. The fact that her mother initially gave her the heads up was enough for Nestor to question and kick-start her podcasting journey — not for personal gains, but to get some form of formal justice that no one else would pay heed to.

Now, director Kasick is able to examine this immature sleuth closely, who boasts of herself as one of the many independent journalists with no formal education in crime-solving, and in hindsight, provides a compelling insight into how Nestor would view Davis’ death. Of course, when you examine a crime long enough, discrepancies are bound to surface. Nestor’s initial plea to uncover the truth draws you in — especially since we’ve all learned to doubt the absolute accuracy of official investigations and the half-truths often spun by law enforcement.

By doing so, Kasick humanizes Nestor in a way that makes “Citizen Slueth” a layered, and dare I say, a wildly entertaining interrogation into the moral grey area between fact and fiction in true crime subculture. It might seem exploitative of Kasick to frame Nestor in such guilt-ridden strokes, but the fact that Kasick may be unconsciously operating from the very perspective he’s critiquing gives the documentary an intriguing meta-edge — one I hope audiences take notice of.