# Wormwood (2017)

> Errol Morris reopens the mysterious death of a scientist caught in a secret Cold War CIA program.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/64020

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 6
- Episode runtime: 42 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: documentary, drama, crime
- Created by: Errol Morris
- Network: Netflix
- Cast: Eric Olson, Peter Sarsgaard, Molly Parker, Christian Camargo, Tim Blake Nelson, Scott Shepherd, David Rudovsky, William Colby
- TMDB rating: 7.0/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7306056/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: dense
- Violence: mild
- Tone: paranoid, melancholic, unsettling, thought provoking

## Synopsis

Wormwood (2017) is a American docudrama miniseries created by Errol Morris for Netflix. Across six episodes of about 42 minutes each, it re-examines the mysterious 1953 death of Frank Olson (Peter Sarsgaard), a U.S. Army biological weapons scientist who was secretly dosed with LSD as part of the CIA's MK-Ultra program. Eric Olson, Frank's son, appears as himself alongside family attorneys and archival interviews, while Molly Parker plays Alice Olson and Tim Blake Nelson plays Sidney Gottlieb. The engine is a family's long hunt for the truth: each episode layers testimony, reenacted scenes, and archive footage, so the official story keeps shifting under the viewer's feet. Morris uses his signature interrogation style, with subjects speaking directly to the camera, to make the investigation feel intimate and unsettling. Set in 1950s America, the atmosphere is paranoid and quietly mournful, a slow, thought provoking look at government secrecy and personal grief. Fans of The Thin Blue Line, The Staircase and other true crime investigations will find resonance here. The miniseries is a single self-contained season that leaves its central question open rather than resolved.

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