Movie review: Nail Bomber, Netflix (2021)

A nice docuseries focusing on events in 1999 in London where a far-right terrorist killed and maimed hundreds of people. I won’t spoil the plot by saying too much but it’s fair to say that this is perfect for lovers of police procedurals like me.

I peripherally remembered something of the attacks but it’s such a long time ago that I watched the show with fresh eyes. The details of who what why had escaped me over the long period – more than 20 years now – since those days. At the time I was living in Japan anyway so it would have been hard for me to access information about such things. If I’d have been living in Australia I would now be better informed, I was sort of existing in a news black hole for most of the nineties.

The show uses a lot of light effects in order to increase a sense of suspense. I was intrigued by this technique. Often with cop shows you have an out-of-focus shot of a road at night, and the lights slipping by each other, all the different sources of light, create a sense of unease because though you sort of know what you’re looking at you can’t be absolutely sure. In ‘Nail Bomber’ these effects are ramped up and used as background for voiceovers, so you get people talking as these lights are slipping around on the screen. It’s as if you are looking at a different, parallel world where things sort of resemble things in your own everyday world but also are quite different.

I guess that sort of sums up the far right.

It might be facile to say something at this point about the far right, we’ve seen it emerge more forcefully here in Australia as well, but more in recent years as an adjunct to street protests that attract a range of different participants. There seems to be a lack of circuit breakers in the UK, maybe people feel cornered in a way that they don’t here so there’s no need in New South Wales or Victoria to go the last step and actually kill someone.

I’m just grasping at straws here. ‘Nail Bomber’ expresses something essential but also something that it would help us better collectively to understand. I would like to see more shows like this but not necessarily ones about crime. Perhaps someone could make a series about the far right across Europe generally and how it manifests itself differently in different countries. Would you watch such a show? Would making it just encourage people to participate in more anti-social ways?