A last-minute shocker in the Season 2 finale of The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, subtitled Natalia Speaks, detonated across social media on Jan. 3. It’s easy to see why the Investigation Discovery docuseries—the Tiger King of early 2024—has generated so much chatter. A parade of unreliable narrators, scammers, showboaters, and kooks, the show offers endless opportunities to puzzle over and debate what really happened. The series features two supremely hateable villains: the enigmatic Kristine Barnett, who did not cooperate with the filmmakers and appears only in a series of selfies and home movie clips, and her ex-husband Michael, who won’t shut up. Insufferably histrionic and self-pitying, Michael Barnett may elicit even more loathing than Kristine, the series’ sinister boogeyman. But let that cliffhanger at the end of Season 2 serve as a reminder. There are two bad guys in this story who never get called to account: the series’ producer-directors Christian and Jackson Conway.
For those not following the saga, the first season of The Curious Case of Natalia Grace related the strange history of the eponymous Ukrainian orphan. Natalia was adopted by the Barnetts, an Indiana couple, in 2010. Bright, with an adorable smile, this new daughter had a rare form of dwarfism that makes prolonged walking or standing painful. The Barnetts claimed that not long after they brought Natalia home, they began to suspect that she was older than the 6 years listed by the adoption agency. They also claimed that she threatened to kill them and their three biological sons. The Barnetts sought treatment for Natalia to little effect, and say they were told by a therapist that she was a sociopath. Eventually, they succeeded in petitioning a court to change Natalia’s official birthdate from 2003 to 1989, making her a legal adult. They then installed her in a series of two apartments and moved to Canada. Natalia lived alone until a family in Lafayette, Indiana, took her in.
In The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, Natalia contests much of the Barnetts’ story, maintaining that Kristine abused her and that she was still a child when her adoptive parents abandoned her to live on her own in a strange town. She has plenty of evidence to support these claims—including dental records showing that she still had many of her baby teeth when she lived with the Barnetts. Michael also appears in the second season, alleging that he too was abused and controlled by Kristine and swearing that he went along with his wife’s anti-Natalia schemes only because she threatened to prevent him from ever seeing their sons again.
Like the season that precedes it, The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks is a grab bag of irresponsible, unscrupulous, and disingenuous “documentary” tricks. The first season painted Natalia as a disturbing homunculus, using murky photos or brief clips from phone videos to punctuate the melodramatic claims of a source (usually Michael) to ominous horror-movie music accompaniment. This is bad enough, but the Conways’ lavish use of reenactments is even more unconscionable.
It soon becomes clear that Michael either lies a lot or simply has no consistent grasp on the truth. He claims, for example, to have witnessed Natalia trying to shove Kristine into an electric fence, then later describes the event as having happened when he was elsewhere. Nevertheless, whenever he tells one of his sketchy anecdotes in an interview, the Conways cut to a reenactment depicting it. These sequences, in which look-alike actors portray real people, come interspersed with found footage of the people themselves. No effort is made to distinguish the two, causing them to blend together in a fluid mélange of reality and highly dubious hearsay, eroding the barrier between truth and fiction.
Reenactments have been a controversial technique in documentary filmmaking for decades. The director Errol Morris came under considerable criticism for using them in his 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line. But Morris’ reenactments are always so stylized that they could never be mistaken for footage of actual events. The Conways, by contrast, adopt the tabloid strategy of making their reenactments look as much like the legitimate documentary footage as possible, intentionally causing confusion in viewers. First, the series uncritically adopts the perspective of the Barnetts, creating reenactments that encourage viewers to believe their version of what happened. Then, it offers up the “twist” that Natalia sees things very differently, presenting reenactments that tacitly endorse her version. The Curious Case of Natalia Grace isn’t a production that cares much about establishing the truth. Instead, the Conways prioritize making the story seem as grotesque and unfathomable as possible.
At least two of the sources interviewed at length in The Curious Case of Natalia Grace seem to be suffering from emotional disturbance. Natalia, who spent her early childhood years in a Ukrainian orphanage and was surrendered by the first American family that adopted her, has clearly survived significant trauma, and Michael—well, it’s impossible to watch his labile dramatics in both seasons of The Curious Case of Natalia Grace without suspecting that something is wrong with the guy. Yet while Beth Karas—a “legal analyst” who has apparently never met or spoken to the people involved in Natalia’s case—gets plenty of screen time to speculate about their motives, at no point do the Conways include the perspective of a mental health professional. When the filmmakers engineer a present-day meeting between Natalia and Michael, no therapist is present to help the participants cope with the volatile emotions the encounter is guaranteed to kindle. Instead, Natalia’s new adoptive father, a pastor named Antwon Mans, launches into a diatribe about “profanity” when Michael uses the word hell, triggering a tantrum from Michael as Natalia sobs in the background. It’s a scene straight from the Jerry Springer playbook, not even reality television but an engineered spectacle.
As with Tiger King, The Curious Case of Natalia Grace allows people to accuse others of crimes—and even supports those allegations with directorial choices—yet seldom attempts to actually substantiate them. This effectively forces the accused to defend themselves against charges impossible to refute. At times, The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks comes across as a flagrant attempt to bait Kristine Barnett out of her silence. (Imagine the ratings The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Kristine Speaks would generate.) That final twist at the end of Natalia Speaks is a voicemail message Mans left for the filmmakers, played over the closing credits. The previously doting and paternal Mans announces, “Something ain’t right with Natalia. This girl is tweakin’. I feel like she’s the enemy in the house.” What does it mean? Several other sources not embroiled in the Barnett family soap opera have described witnessing troubling behavior, such as sexual overtures toward grown men and prepubescent boys, from Natalia. It would be surprising if she didn’t occasionally act out. But there isn’t anyone in The Curious Case of Natalia Grace to explain why this might happen and what it means—just an endless cycle of trumped-up demonization, encouraged by exploitative filmmakers to repeat itself over and over again, regardless of whom it hurts.
