The Investigation of Lucy Letby

The Architecture of Doubt

True crime often functions as a machine for certainty. It takes the chaotic, terrifying debris of tragedy and arranges it into a neat narrative of monsters and victims, providing a comforting, if grim, closure. But Dominic Sivyer’s *The Investigation of Lucy Letby* (2026) refuses this function. Arriving on Netflix amidst a firestorm of renewed legal scrutiny and shifting public opinion, Sivyer’s film is not merely a recounting of Britain’s most prolific child serial killer case; it is a destabilizing study of how the human need for answers can sometimes obscure the complexities of truth.



Sivyer, known for his dialectical approach in *Rebel Nun*, constructs the film as a visual and tonal tug-of-war. He eschews the sensationalist reenactments common to the genre, opting instead for a colder, more clinical aesthetic that mirrors the neonatal unit itself. The director relies heavily on the "architecture" of the evidence—the physical layout of the Countess of Chester Hospital, the rigid columns of staff rotas, and the now-infamous Post-it notes. However, the film's visual centerpiece is the never-before-seen interrogation footage. Here, Sivyer holds the camera on Letby for uncomfortable durations. We are invited to scrutinize her every micro-expression, her beige leisure wear, and her trembling hands. Yet, rather than revealing the "face of evil," these sequences offer a disturbing banality that resists easy interpretation. Is this the dissociation of a psychopath, or the terror of the wrongly accused? Sivyer refuses to tell us, forcing the audience to sit in the suffocating ambiguity.

The film’s "heart"—if one can call it that in such a harrowing context—lies in its friction between emotional testimony and statistical abstraction. The inclusion of an anonymized interview with a victim’s parent provides the necessary, crushing gravity of the loss involved. These moments are filmed with a respectful intimacy, often in soft focus, contrasting sharply with the sharp, high-contrast interviews of the legal and medical experts. It is here that the documentary pivots from a standard crime procedural to something more provocative. By giving screen time to experts like Dr. Shoo Lee and the "scientific doubts" movement that gained traction in 2025, the film challenges the very medical evidence that secured Letby's conviction. We watch as the certainty of the "air embolism" theory is deconstructed on screen, turning the hospital data from a smoking gun into a question mark.



Ultimately, *The Investigation of Lucy Letby* is a difficult, demanding watch, not only because of the tragic subject matter but because it denies the viewer the catharsis of moral absolutism. It does not explicitly argue for innocence, nor does it blindly reaffirm guilt. Instead, it exposes the fragility of the systems we trust to arbitrate life and death. In an era of true crime that often treats convictions as content, Sivyer has created a work that feels less like a verdict and more like an open wound, suggesting that the true horror of this case may lie in the possibility that we still do not fully understand what happened in that ward.