The No. 1 Movie on Netflix Is Every Parent's Worst Nightmare

A Netflix documentary centers on Mackenzie Shirilla, a Strongsville, Ohio high school student and aspiring model and influencer, whose 2022 crash killed her boyfriend and his friend. A promotional image shows her face in a car side mirror against a pink, cinematic backdrop, which confused some viewers who mistook the story for fiction. The film presents Shirilla’s social media closely, including vertical videos, makeup and styling, body-focused imagery, and captions, alongside evidence used in court. Prosecutors used her online posts to argue about remorse, including a Halloween video recorded three months after the crash. The case draws attention partly because Shirilla’s online persona feels distinctly modern.

"The movie poster for today's No. 1 film on Netflix, , depicts a car's side mirror against a pink landscape streaked with passing headlights. Peeking out of the mirror with an enigmatic smile is half the gamine face of Mackenzie Shirilla, a Strongsville, Ohio, high school student and aspiring model and influencer who drove a Toyota Camry into the side of a building at almost 100 mph in 2022, killing her 20-year-old boyfriend, Dominic Russo, and her boyfriend's friend, 19-year-old Davion Flanagan."

"The documentary, directed by Gareth Johnson and Angharad Scott, brings you up close and personal with Shirilla's social media, never going long without serving some vertical video showing her worryingly thin body in midriff-baring outfits, her false eyelashes and elaborate makeup, her duckface, her driver's-seat bong hits, and her preening, sassy captions. Shirilla seems to have been one of those obsessed posters who lack any sense of taste or context."

"Johnson and Scott clearly knew these social media videos had power, as did the prosecutor who played some of them in court when Shirilla went on trial in 2023. In an especially provocative choice, the prosecution tried to prove a lack of remorse by playing a video of the teen posing in a ghoulish Halloween costume before a party, only three months after the crash, looking like the Corpse Bride, waist snatched by a corset to an impossible smal"

Read at Slate Magazine