The Case Against Adnan Syed, review: a wrenching riposte to the gossipy Serial

Podcasting’s rockstar moment arrived on October 3, 2014, with the release of Serial. Chatty and spritzed with twists, this addictive revisiting of the murder 15 years previously of a Baltimore school girl become an instant phenomenon – and the urtext for the true-crime wave to follow.

But what about the victim, 18 year-old Woodlawn High School student Hae Min Lee? That spiky question glinted at the heart of part one of Amy Berg’s The Case Against Adnan Syed (Sky Atlantic). Berg, whose filmography includes documentaries about the West Memphis Three and child abuse rings in Hollywood, trained an unflinching eye on the Lee murder investigation and the circus that rolled into town with Serial.

Serial was told largely from the perspective of Adnan Syed, who had been romantically involved with Lee and is serving a life sentence for her murder. A charismatic athlete from a strict Pakistani Muslim family, he has consistently pleaded his innocence. And though Serial was ultimately unable to clear his name, many of its tens of millions of listeners went away convinced he was the victim of a police stitch-up.

Berg came at the story from a different angle in the first of four instalments. Syed’s mother, alongside his defence lawyer Rabia Chaudry, were interviewed (as with Serial, Lee’s family declined to participate). However, the focus was Lee, her interior life and her demons. Berg’s documentary was thus a riposte to the gossipy tone of Serial, which, with its chatty narration by presenter Sarah Koenig, arguably jarred with the bleak subject matter. Just as importantly, Berg interrogated true crime’s instinct to marginalise the victims whose stories it purports to tell.

Lee had confided in friends, including Syed, about sexual abuse she had suffered back in Korea, we learned. But narrated excerpts from her diary also portrayed an idealistic, slightly hippyish young woman, infatuated with Syed one moment, frustrated by his conservative family the next.

Interviews with old school friends, remembering a young woman frozen in time, were supplemented with animations of Lee. This was a potentially exploitative flourish that somehow landed the right side of mawkish.

A sharp contrast was meanwhile drawn between the raw wound of her friends’s grief and Koenig’s ascent to podcast stardom. We saw the journalist on a victory lap of chat shows and award ceremonies. Back in Baltimore, people had to pick up the pieces.

Despite the provocative title, the guilt or innocence of Syed was left for future episodes. But what Berg achieved was just as important – if perhaps less enticing to true-crime junkies.

She took a person who had been defined only by a terrible evil done to her – and the media carnival that followed with Serial – and restored her right to be remembered as a human being. As testament to a tragedy, Berg’s documentary was wrenching. As a quiet indictment of true crime and its ghastly razzmatazz, it was devastating.