The movie poster for today’s No. 1 film on Netflix, The Crash, depicts a car’s side mirror against a pink landscape streaked with passing headlights. Peeking out of the mirror with an enigmatic smile is half the gamine face of Mackenzie Shirilla, a Strongsville, Ohio, high school student and aspiring model and influencer who drove a Toyota Camry into the side of a building at almost 100 mph in 2022, killing her 20-year-old boyfriend, Dominic Russo, and her boyfriend’s friend, 19-year-old Davion Flanagan. The effect of this image is cinematic, evoking a gritty road movie starring some brunette starlet, and confused at least some viewers online, who, unfamiliar with the Shirilla story, thought The Crash was a fictional film rather than a documentary.
Netflix knows where its bread is buttered. Everyone’s obsessed with the Shirilla case not because it’s especially complex, but because Shirilla is such a uniquely 2020s teen, a potent mix of beautiful and detestable. The documentary, directed by Gareth Johnson and Angharad Scott, brings you up close and personal with Shirilla’s social media, never going long without serving some vertical video showing her worryingly thin body in midriff-baring outfits, her false eyelashes and elaborate makeup, her duckface, her driver’s-seat bong hits, and her preening, sassy captions. Shirilla seems to have been one of those obsessed posters who lack any sense of taste or context. Many such cases, as the man said, but not so many where the poster was at such risk of messing up the case for her own innocence.
Johnson and Scott clearly knew these social media videos had power, as did the prosecutor who played some of them in court when Shirilla went on trial in 2023. In an especially provocative choice, the prosecution tried to prove a lack of remorse by playing a video of the teen posing in a ghoulish Halloween costume before a party, only three months after the crash, looking like the Corpse Bride, waist snatched by a corset to an impossible smallness. “No amount of protesting from her deluded parents or friends can erase how vile she comes across in her social media posts,” wrote one viewer of The Crash in a Rotten Tomatoes audience review. This strategy also worked for the prosecutor: Shirilla was convicted of murder, felonious assault, aggravated vehicular homicide, drug possession, and possession of criminal tools, and given life in prison, with eligibility of parole after 15 years. Shirilla continues to claim that she blacked out before the crash, and had no intent to kill her passengers.
This crash had already been the subject of an episode of the HBO show Mean Girl Murders—a much less sober production, featuring cheesy reenactments and interviews with other alums of her school who saw Shirilla as irredeemably toxic—and has been an object of fascination on true-crime YouTube. But this Netflix documentary is the first time the imprisoned Shirilla, her parents, and her influencer friend Rosie Graham (almost a million followers on TikTok) have gone on camera to recount their version of events. Although in the past week YouTube has exploded with follow-up videos to The Crash, arguing that Johnson and Scott left out key pieces of evidence against Shirilla, the documentary is far from kind to this girl. And it’s utter nightmare fuel for parents.
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The Shirilla family likely wishes they never agreed to participate in The Crash, not least because, after the doc hit Netflix, Shirilla’s father was put on administrative leave from his teaching job. The doc didn’t break the news that the couple let their 13-year-old daughter start a relationship with a 17-year-old, and later let her move in with that boyfriend while she was still in high school, but it did disseminate that information to a much, much wider audience. Shirilla’s father, looking like Jon Stewart’s long-lost brother and wearing an ill-chosen T-shirt with the word “Boom!” on it in comic-book font, defensively admitted that he didn’t mind Mackenzie smoking weed. “I don’t have a problem with her smoking dope,” he said. “If you’re going to smoke a drug, that’s the one I believe you should take.” In a follow-up interview with TMZ, where he claimed Netflix took the comment out of context, Shirilla sort of clarified that he didn’t “allow” his daughter to smoke weed, but also hadn’t stopped her: “I couldn’t lock her up in her room.” Shirilla’s mother said Mackenzie didn’t “need much discipline,” and that she always trusted her daughter’s testimony when she was accused of bullying at school—clearly, a mother clinging to an ingrained narrative about her daughter’s good character, long after she should have realized this was a child in trouble.
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On the other hand, Davion’s bereaved father, Scott Flanagan, a steady, rational on-screen presence, has developed a minor fandom. A few days after the crash, with Mackenzie’s following growing as she posted from the hospital, Shirilla and her mother corresponded with a brand who reached out via Instagram comment for a collaboration, responding with a bland, eager positivity that’s shocking to read, given the context. Flanagan said, “Nobody in their right mind would post about being thrilled about an opportunity after they’d just killed two people”—the audience’s exact thoughts. On X, the singer Cardi B shared a screenshot of Flanagan and commented, “Love him. He does not play!”
Is the growing obsession with Shirilla, fueled by this new documentary (as one person who said they believe in Shirilla’s guilt argued on X), misogyny directed toward a teen girl doing the things teen girls now do? In her interviews, where she acts as a sort of character witness for her friend, Rosie Graham tells the documentarians that the Halloween 2022 corpse makeup was just a homage to Playboi Carti, and tries to explain to older viewers that Shirilla’s videos shouldn’t be used against her, saying that they don’t understand the pace of the internet. Graham herself, she says, posts so many times a day, it’s hard to remember the details. “You cannot use that against her,” Graham argues. What the reaction to The Crash shows is that people will absolutely, definitely use that against her. They already have.
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