Review of The Truth Is Out There

I saw this documentary at the BFI in London a few days ago and have to say it is a curious film. Initially I had been led to believe that it was an investigation by Dean Haglund into conspiracy theories and their generation and popularity, however, in retrospect it is something quite different. It meanders and weaves and doesn't succeed in coming to any meaningful point. One thing that I struggled with through the entire film is that nobody is put into context, and in fact there is also no attempt to analyse different types of conspiracy theory or to explain why they remain an ever present part of popular culture. Instead we have Dean Haglund interviewing a variety of individuals, and this really means a very passive form of interviewing - he lets each protagonist have their say and is open minded and not challenging in any way to the things that are said. We also see, inter-cut, a therapy session for Dean Haglund that seems to culminate in the observation that everyone has their own truth and world view. It would have been a great point to have cut to the various interviewees to ask them : Why do you think the way you do and when did you begin to think like this? The film feels too long - it's well over 2 hours and there seem to be some completely irrelevant scenes - we see Dean talking to his nephew and his brother about their travel plans and homelife, and also that Dean Haglund has invented a laptop cooling system...not that interesting and in fact not helpful to the narrative at all. There are also some really strange issues with the score, which sometimes gets really loud, and in fact during one interview with a particularly passionate radio host convinced me that the film was about to end...but it didn't. Normally I would have expected some hypothesis to have been tested, or for some revelations and illustrations to provide some framework to have educated the audience by the end of the film but this just didn't happen. I am not joking when one audience member fell asleep and began to snore during this showing! To be fair there are a handful of laughs during the film but it is not especially humorous, nor intelligently handled so one is left wondering just what the filmmakers were trying to achieve. Overall I feel this documentary is a mish mash of unrelated scenes that has little to add to the subject area. Dean Haglund seems a fairly pleasant guy but you don't need a 2 hours plus documentary to tell you that.