“Do I look like a monster to you?” asks Natalia Grace at the outset of The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, at which point the docuseries cuts to a creepy shot of the controversial disabled dwarf staring out a window set to horror movie-style shrieking sound effects.
ID’s follow-up to May’s non-fiction hit wants to have it both ways, suggesting that Natalia is the victim of horrible abuse at the hands of her adopted parents, Michael and Kristine Barnett, and also a potential psychopath who was pretending to be a young girl when she was an adult (à la the Orphan films) and, to top it all off, was intent on murdering her caregivers. As its head-snapping late surprise indicates, all those things might be true. Yet what’s unquestionably clear is that, for all their wild accusations against each other, everyone involved in this trashy saga is more than a bit screwy.
Per its title, The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks is driven by the commentary of its primary subject, who gives her side of the story and, in doing so, touches upon most elements of the original docuseries. This makes ID’s latest (Jan. 1), on the one hand, an alternate-perspective revisitation of already covered material, and its rehashing sometimes leads to runtime-padding wheel-spinning.
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Nonetheless, there’s plenty of fresh madness to be found in this six-episode sequel, from allegations about sexual deviance and drug-overdose murder plots, to violent conspiracies, spooky musical cues, and heated confrontations that end in abrupt walkouts. Moreover, there are tears—so many tears—from both Natalia and Michael Barnett, whose sit-downs are the centerpieces of this venture, and feature an absurd amount of performative handwringing, commiserating, blame-game deflection, and finger-pointing in the direction of “evil” Kristine.
Natalia now lives with Bishop Antwon and Cynthia Mans, the pious couple that happily took her in following her ordeal with the Barnetts, and in her numerous new interviews in The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, she presents her version of her sensationalistic ordeal. Unsurprisingly, she declares that, despite being legally re-aged by Michael and Kristine from an adolescent to an adult (with her birth year changed from 2003 to 1989), she was not a grown-up while in their custody.
Additionally, she says she is not a homicidal maniac, nor a promiscuous predator who tried to (among other things) fondle a young boy, sleep with old men, or have sex with Michael. She states that this was all concocted by Michael and Kristine, and that their decisions to slander her in this way, to have her committed to a psychiatric hospital, and to abandon her by relocating her to two separate apartments where she lived alone (and had her electricity cut), were cruel and criminally neglectful.
Natalia is pretty persuasive on most of those fronts, since The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks presents conclusive evidence from a dentist and a DNA lab that Natalia was just a kid when Michael and Kristine did all of this to her. The initial question, then, is why did the Barnetts go through all this trouble? Guided by heavily scripted and tabloid-y narration from “expert” Beth Karas and endless self-serving blather from Michael (not to mention input from other acquaintances and law enforcement officials), ID’s docuseries implies that Kristine was mainly responsible for this insanity.
As this theory goes, Kristine—who’d had prior success promoting her son Jacob as a “genius” with her book The Spark—adopted Natalia because she believed she could transform the Ukrainian-born girl into a similar prodigy. When that didn’t pan out, she pivoted, casting Natalia as an unhinged villain as well as an adult, which therefore allowed her to ditch the kid without any repercussions to her guru reputation. Furthermore, she probably didn’t want to pay for Natalia’s various surgeries and medical costs.
This makes some sense, yet without Kristine’s participation, it’s still one-sided conjecture and is complicated by the fact that, as Michael’s lawyer Terrance Kinnard argues, Natalia has been accused of harming members of every family she’s joined—and, thus, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Given the sheer number of tawdry assertions tossed about in The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, trying to separate truth from fiction is borderline impossible, this despite Natalia and Michael twice sitting down with each other to hash things out and, hopefully, to make amends. During these talks, the first of which concludes rather brusquely, they castigate (her), deceptively misconstrue (him), and weep in such an over-the-top insincere manner (both) that they come across as equally disingenuous phonies desperate to look good for the cameras.
Throughout, Natalia discusses long-ago memories (from when she was a baby in Ukraine to age 7 in the United States) that seem far too vivid and specific to be believable, and Michael outright contradicts the statements he previously made in the original The Curious Case of Natalia Grace.
Couple their deceitfulness with their repetitiveness, and the result is enough hot air to run a fleet of Hindenburgs—all of which culminates with lots of disastrously mushy lies, apologies, and forgiving prayers. Michael in particular is the definition of untrustworthy, his every dramatic utterance and attendant gesture and sob resonating as a sham. Natalia, alas, delivers so many soundbite-ready pronouncements that she isn’t considerably more credible, at least insofar as her own behavior is concerned.
Those hoping for definitive resolutions will be disappointed by The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, which teases answers and then, in its closing moments, drops a bombshell that detonates what seemed to be a relatively open-and-shut case of twisted dysfunction and demented abuse. Whether Natalia is the innocent victim she purports to be, or something closer to the deranged, licentious, and potentially homicidal fiend her critics claim, is a question that ultimately remains just open-ended enough to tantalize, unnerve, and inspire heated debate—as well as to provide an opportunity for another docuseries follow-up.
From the sounds of things, that’s an inevitability that viewers can expect in the not-too-distant future.
