London Film Festival review - Bayou Blue

This documentary is an interesting counterpoint to West of Memphis.  What happens when the police investigate murders thoroughly, prosecutors act fairly, and the media doesn’t turn the whole thing into a three-ring circus? The right man is arrested and sent away for a long time.  Does it make an interesting film? Not really.

Bayou Blue looks at a spate of murders of young men that took place around New Orleans between 1997 and 2006.  Body after body was found face down in creeks or on verges, victims of rape and strangulation. Some of the men were openly gay, some were straight. The police were baffled as to how the killer had lured each one into his car and gained their trust enough to overpower them.

Eventually the killer was caught, but the world wasn’t interested and one of America’s most prolific serial killers hardly made the papers. In a culture obsessed with the grizzly details of crime, you’d think that the sheer number of victims would guarantee column inches, but in this case many of the victims were homeless, most were black, and the area they lived in was poor and remote.

This lack of interest on the part of the media is a scandal, but unfortunately directors Alix Lambert and David McMahon’s style doesn’t let the viewer get too worked up about it. The film is as lugubrious as the flow of the titular bayou. The story isn’t really shown in order, so there is no sense of a story unfolding, of the growing concern of police or really how they pieced together the investigation. It’s just one body discovered in 2003, one in 2002, one in 1999.

The families and friends of the victims are interviewed – their words heart breaking, their faces testaments to their hard lives. But their stories are presented in a very haphazard way, again chopping back and forth. The detectives come across as extremely professional people who take their work very seriously. We hear from the killer himself, but the audio recordings are crackly and just contain perfunctory details of each death that are played behind lingering shots of yet more barren fields and remote ditches. We learn nothing about the killer’s background, a staggering omission that leaves him an almost faceless figure.

Perhaps the aim was to make a quietly creepy film full of menace, but to me it was just dull. I don’t want to say that the papers and news channels were right not to cover this story – the victims deserve our attention as much as any middle class white girl who vanishes – but you have to prove its worth to the audience by making it gripping. It would have been better if the makers of Bayou Blue had used a few more of the enemy’s tactics and sensationalised what happened just a little to keep the audience’s emotional interest, rather than just piquing liberal guilt.