🎭 Netflix’s New Catfish Doc Is Sending Viewers Spiraling Here’s What “Unknown Number” Gets Right 😱 If you think your group chat drama is chaotic, wait until you watch a teen romance implode under a flood of anonymous messages, only for the alleged troll to turn out to be the last person anyone expected. Netflix’s “Unknown Number: The High School Catfish,” directed by Skye Borgman, is the kind of true-crime story that makes you pause the show and just stare at the wall for a minute. It is trending hard for a reason.
The film unpacks a small-town Michigan case where two high schoolers were harassed for months by mystery numbers, the FBI got involved, and the ultimate reveal turned the story from whodunnit to how-could-this-happen. Viewers are now debating what counts as cyberbullying, what parental boundaries should look like in the age of burner apps, and where accountability ends and empathy begins.
Let’s get the headline out of the way. The film is sitting at number one on the Netflix U.S. Top 10, which means your For You Page is probably already spoiled by reaction clips and hot takes. The placement is backed up by independent ranking aggregators, so this is not just a Netflix banner flex — the audience interest is real.
Borgman, known for gripping real-world stories that balance empathy with tension, sets a quiet Midwestern scene, then lets the dread creep in as Lauryn Licari and her then boyfriend, Owen McKenny, start receiving hostile, obsessive messages from unknown numbers. The pacing is deliberate. Early on, the film resists the urge to go full tabloid and instead lets the kids speak, which keeps the center of gravity on how young people experience digital harm. That is critical because the harassment is not treated like a plot device. It is an ecosystem — late-night pings, shifting area codes, screenshots, accusations, and the emotional tax of never knowing when the next buzz means another blowup.
The twist arrives like a gut punch. When investigators finally trace the texts, the source is not a jealous ex or a rival classmate. It is Lauryn’s mother, Kendra Licari. The reveal is not sensationalized. Borgman frames it with stillness and lets the unimaginable sink in. After months of digital stalking, Kendra was arrested, later pleaded guilty to two counts related to stalking a minor, and received a sentence of nineteen months to five years before being released on parole in 2024. The documentary picks up on the aftermath, documenting how a family and a town try to move forward when trust has been burned through.
True-crime docs live or die by access, and “Unknown Number” gets unusually close. Kendra participates on camera, which the production says came late in the process. The choice to place her interview in the back half is strategic and deeply uncomfortable in the way good journalism often is. You do not have to accept her self-analysis to sit with it. The film gives space to the teens’ voices first, then lets Kendra speak, then lets the audience decide where their empathy lands. Netflix’s own behind-the-scenes reporting notes that the team had nearly finished the film before she agreed to be interviewed, and that editorial decision explains the careful build to the reveal.
What the documentary does exceptionally well is map the social shrapnel. It is not just about two teens. It is the classmates who got pulled into the suspicion spiral. It is the friend accused by screenshots that appear to be hers. It is the parents trying to do the right thing while also being wildly out of their depth. Several outlets highlight the scale of the messages, the way spoofing apps complicated the investigation, and how accusations ripped through friend groups before the FBI traced the pattern back to a single device. Watching those interviews, you feel the surveillance paranoia that anonymous harassment creates.
Borgman’s craft shows up in the edit. The film refuses to flatten a messy, human situation into a single “why.” Coverage around the release mentions theories like a cyber variant of Munchausen by proxy. The doc raises those ideas and backs away from diagnostic certainty, keeping focus on accountability. That restraint matters. Viewers do not need a clinical label to understand the damage done, and the film refuses to hand out tidy answers where none exist.
“Unknown Number” also takes care with content that could be unsafe for younger audiences. It acknowledges that some messages encouraged self-harm without lingering on explicit language. That editorial line illustrates how you can tell a story about digital abuse while not replicating harm. The result is watchable but still bracing.
The larger cultural conversation here is about trust in the digital home. We talk a lot about stranger danger online, but this story forces a harder question: what happens when the threat vector lives inside the house and understands your habits, your passwords, your schedule. The doc prioritizes digital literacy themes without getting preachy. Borgman uses the case to push for basics like device boundaries, open communication, and the humility to believe kids when they say something is wrong.
Where are they now is the part audiences always crave, and the film delivers updates that echo across the press cycle. Kendra’s parole status has been widely reported. Lauryn is looking ahead to college with criminology in mind. Owen has spoken about the experience in the documentary. One classmate, Khloe, has publicly worked to correct rumors after being accused earlier in the timeline. You can feel the teenagers trying to reclaim their own narratives. It is not a neat ending. It is a foggy morning after, and that honesty keeps the film from turning into a victory lap.
Cinematically, the doc is spare and effective. No flashy reenactments. No melodramatic score swallowing the interviews. The aesthetic reads like a restrained procedural, almost a tech forensic chamber piece. When the film does cut to phone screens, it avoids the visual clutter that plagues lesser true-crime entries. The aesthetic choice respects viewers who are tired of “docu-noise.” It trusts you to connect dots without being spoon-fed.
Here is the uncomfortable truth. The reason “Unknown Number” detonates on social media is not just the twist. It is the way the story mirrors the ambient anxiety of 2025 digital life. Everyone is more reachable than ever. Everyone is more impersonatable than ever. A single motivated person with a stack of spoofing apps can make a teen feel hunted inside their own bedroom. That is not a crime thriller flourish. That is an everyday reality for millions of kids, and the doc’s biggest achievement is making that reality impossible to scroll past.
It also helps that this release arrived at the perfect pop-culture moment. In the last year we have had a Lifetime movie inspired by the case, a wave of explainer features, and a public tired of glossy scandals with no aftercare. Borgman’s film gives the people at the center of the story room to breathe. It lets a town admit it got things wrong. It lets a father and daughter build a new ritual out of shared breakfasts instead of shared court dates. It is not redemption. It is repair, slow and unglamorous. That choice makes for a quieter final act, and in a genre obsessed with gotchas, quiet feels radical.
By the time credits roll, you will probably text someone you love to check in. You will probably Google your phone’s safety settings. You might even put a screen-time boundary on your kid’s device. That is the kind of impact documentary makers dream about. And it is why “Unknown Number” is not just another true-crime title climbing the Top 10. It is a cultural mirror, held uncomfortably close.
The scariest part of “Unknown Number” is not the reveal. It is the realization that in a world of infinite phone numbers, the only real number that matters is the one you can dial at 2 a.m. and be believed.
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