How One Lonely Man’s Online Date Turned Into a Bloody Nightmare

Online dating can be a minefield. Your feelings can get hurt. Your confidence can be shaken. Your time can be wasted. And you can wander into a maelstrom of murder, arson, and identity theft that leaves you questioning your previously established reality. This is the point at which a situation morphs from social annoyance to Netflix true crime documentary.

Lover, Stalker, Killer, whose title practically screams “edgy true crime doc!,” is a sort of tech-age cautionary tale about what can happen when you go looking for love on all the wrong websites. It underscores, highlights, and italicizes the fact that we really know nothing about the people behind those faces and bios we click. It asks a worthwhile question: You thought catfishing was bad? Wait’ll you get a load of this.

Dave Kroupa, a Midwestern mechanic newly departed from a serious relationship that yielded two children, was ready to have a little fun with no strings attached. He went a-clicking and a-courting, reeling in Liz, who seemed fun and willing until they slowly drifted apart. Then, like a noir femme fatale, into his auto shop walked Cari, needing some help with her car. Dave obliged, then bumped into Cari online and started “dating” her. One awkward, fateful night, Liz and Carrie were briefly at Dave’s home at the same time. And that’s when things began to get true crimey.

Lover, Stalker, Killer is told largely through the words of Kroupa, then a fresh-faced lover, now a bearded man with a far-away look in his eye. Director Sam Hobkinson (Misha and the Wolves) has the present-day Kroupa reenact many of his past adventures, creating a sensation of collapsing time, a blurring between then and now. Other characters soon enter the picture, including Jim Doty, Ryan Avis and Tony Kava, a trio of Iowa law enforcers who smell something fishy and start doing the legwork (or, in the case of Kava, an eccentric hacker, the computer work) to prove their hunches.

It’s hard to dance around the salient facts here, but since this isn’t a terribly well-known story, it’s probably worth the effort. Cari, the woman from the auto shop, disappears into the thin air of real life, but Kroupa begins getting an onslaught of threatening texts and emails from a person claiming to be her. Liz tells Kroupa she, too, is being stalked by Cari. Then Liz’s house is burned to the ground, killing her pets (the truly innocent victims of this fatal attraction) and sending investigators into overdrive.

Through the first half of Lover, Stalker, Killer you keep wondering if this is merely a tale of tech terror and a vengeful ex-lover, or if a twist is forthcoming. Then that twist arrives, and it’s a doozy. Hobkinson deserves credit for creating suspense throughout, with assistance from Nick Foster’s score, which happily flirts with Bernard Herrmann, and cinematography and editing that add to the feeling of disorientation and instability. These kinds of films can live and die by the quality of their reenactments, and Lover, Stalker, Killer does well on this count. It often feels like a narrative movie, with Kroupa playing the role of the noir chump who gets in way over his head and pays the price for his feckless, wandering eye. You wanted to have a little fun? Well, here you are.

If the doc has a hole in it, it’s the villain, who perhaps necessarily feels like an enigma, or even a cipher. Crazy gonna crazy, but it generally helps if crazy comes with just a little bit of psychological profile. This is the rare case when such a project could actually stand to be a little longer; the film checks in at a lean 90 minutes, which is certainly better than four stretched-out episodes, but still a bit thin for this tale. Then again, the moral of the story comes through loud and clear. That time you spend polishing your Tinder profile might be better spent taking the time to get to know someone out in the real world. Might just save a little trouble on the back end.