A moment about Unknown Number

What you need to know about Unknown Number

The story is familiar to you: a cute 12-year-old girl, Lauryn, gets a boyfriend, Owen. They play sports together, go to school together. An innocent, all-American high school sweetheart situation. Until Lauryn starts receiving messages from an unknown number, hence the title, more and more frequently. The texts become increasingly explicit and harsh, with even regular encouragements for Lauryn to take her own life. Owen, Lauryn's boyfriend, also receives these kinds of texts regularly. The sender wants Owen and does everything to get Lauryn out of the way. When Lauryn and Owen end their relationship after twelve months of cyberstalking, the texts are certainly not over. When Owen gets a new girlfriend after a while, the cyberstalking continues and his new girlfriend also receives a bucket of hate dumped on her daily. Everyone is involved to find out who the perpetrator is. The school cooperates, the police of course, and also the parents of Owen and Lauryn. What turns out? Lauryn's mother is the perpetrator. It's terrible how coarse and mean this is. This stream of messages will forever mean trauma in the lives of Owen and Lauryn. So much for the gruesome story, I suppose. But then the documentary.

What I think of Unknown Number

Of course, the documentary was made after the fact. The main characters were all interviewed afterwards, including Lauryn's mother. And that makes it very bizarre. First, you see her talking about the messages, about how difficult it is for her daughter and for Owen, and later, in exactly the same setting, she reacts to the reveal. Then she cries and breaks down and tries to somewhat explain why she did this. In this, she completely falls short, because what argument could justify this? Nothing. As a result, you almost think that the main characters are extremely good actors. Because even Owen's mother can tell very well what the situation is like when they don't have the perpetrator yet, while, as it turns out later, she already knew during those recordings that it was Lauryn's mother. Anyway, I found that strange. Although you could also think that the creators are gifted interviewers who have been able to guide the main characters of this story well to certain moments and got them to respond as if they were ‘in the now’.

Revelations in Unknown Number: mother and daughter

What I also found very peculiar was that at the moment Lauryn heard that her mother was the perpetrator, she did not get angry at her mother. Her mother stood behind her and started giving her kisses and petting her, and Lauryn did not exactly throw herself into her arms, but she endured the cuddling and did take her mother's arm. She was probably completely in shock, and there is of course no blueprint for how you react in such a situation, but I found it remarkable. This raid in Lauryn's house was filmed with a hidden camera at the moment itself by the police, so this is not acted out. But I found this remarkable. Furthermore, Kendra, Lauryn's mother, is portrayed as a very involved and active mother who was always on the sidelines and went along on school trips, etc. At that reveal, you see a house that is so shockingly messy that it in no way matched the tidied-up mother as she was portrayed in the rest of the documentary. It also turned out that she had not had a job for a year or longer without anyone knowing, so it feels as a viewer that a whole lot of aspects of this story are not being touched upon. Kendra, Lauryn's mother, also does not get much further than the fact that she has been through a lot and ‘everyone does something wrong or stupid in their life’. An analyst explains that Kendra may suffer from a form of Munchausen by Proxy, where the mother would make a child sick or in this case weak and dependent in order to then comfort her.

Unknown Number: the consequences for Lauryn and her mother

The documentary ends with the fact that mother Kendra has to go to prison for a year and a half and that she and Lauryn are not allowed to see each other for that long. You do see some snippets from emails from Kendra to Lauryn that are so cheerful and jolly that ‘unstable’ is a word that is somewhat appropriate.
I've been a bit confused since Monday evening. You?

Source: Netflix