First trailer drops for Netflix's 'Unabomber' thriller led by Russell Crowe
Netflix has unveiled the first trailer for UNABOMBER, a true-crime thriller led by a star-studded cast.
The first full look at UNABOMBER sets its tone fast: we’re in 1994 amid the wreckage of a mail bomb, then snapped back to 1958 Harvard, where a 16-year-old prodigy named Ted Kaczynski sits down for a study that doesn’t feel like homework. Jacob Tremblay plays the teenage Kaczynski, and the trailer frames his sessions with a renowned psychologist as the fuse that keeps burning underneath everything that follows.
That psychologist is Henry Murray, played by Russell Crowe with a cool, hypnotic edge. Murray’s controversial experiments on his star subject are positioned as one of the film ’s most unsettling threads, blurring academic rigor with psychological manipulation. At one point, he leans in to the gifted teen, telling him there’s “something special” about him—then issues a warning that sounds like a prophecy.
“Ideas are like fire.”
Two timelines
Director Janus Metz structures the film on a split track: the making and the eventual capture of the Unabomber. One timeline steeps us in Kaczynski’s formative Harvard years; the other follows the federal manhunt decades later, tracking how a brilliant student turned into one of the FBI’s most notorious targets.
On the investigation side, Shailene Woodley plays FBI agent Joanne Miller, the one pushing the case forward as the bombings escalate. The trailer makes clear this isn’t a simple chase—its charge comes from interrogation rooms, tape recorders, and the unnerving echo of past experiments bleeding into the hunt.
Cast and crew
- Russell Crowe — Dr. Henry Murray, the Harvard psychologist whose controversial studies ensnare Kaczynski
- Jacob Tremblay — Ted Kaczynski as a 16-year-old Harvard prodigy
- Shailene Woodley — FBI agent Joanne Miller, leading the investigation years later
- Janus Metz — director
UNABOMBER premieres exclusively on Netflix on September 25, 2026 .